The aim of this study is to develop a systematic method on the basis of Petri net models to automatically generate operating procedures for multiple material transfer tasks in any batch process. The system model of the pipeline network used for such tasks is built by assembling the component nets representing piping elements, i.e., fragments, valves, pumps and/or compressors, according to the network configuration. All possible material-transfer routes and the corresponding operating procedures are then identified in a constrained system net, which can be constructed by imposing a set of control rules to the system model. A realistic example is presented at the end of this paper to demonstrate the effectiveness and correctness of the proposed approach. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.