Petri nets have been proposed as a suitable tool for expressing precedence constraints and computing assembly sequences. Motivations for using Petri nets stem from their clear and well-defined semantics as well as from the formal analysis tools and techniques available. In this paper the operation and properties of Petri net models representing assembly plans are reconnected to the fundamental properties of Petri nets. In spite of the work already done on assembly planning using Petri nets, we feel that some of these results can benefit from a deeper binding to Petri net analysis techniques. This reinterpretation leads to more efficient and straightforward techniques for finding all assembly sequences, selecting the best sequence according to some cost criterion, composing subassemblies, and evaluating plan performance in some specified workcell setup.
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