Modeling and Simulating Customer Flow in Grocery Stores Using Petri Nets

This study presents a modular Petri net framework for modeling and optimizing customer flow in grocery stores, addressing critical bottlenecks in checkout efficiency. Leveraging Colored Petri Nets and GPenSIM for simulation, we develop a scalable architecture comprising three interconnected modules such that capture real-world dynamics while mitigating state-space explosion. Key innovations includes a parallelized payment design reducing peak queue lengths. Our simulations analyze scenarios with Poisson-distributed arrivals, variable basket sizes, and cashier scanning rates. Results demonstrate that payment methods (cash/card) have negligible impact on throughput, staffing imbalances occur with more than three cashiers, and modular decomposition enables much faster simulation.