Abstract Communities of autonomous units are devices for the visual modeling of interactive logistic processes. The framework is founded on rule-based graph transformation and allows specifying autonomous units in such a way that they can run in parallel and make their decision about future actions independently of each other. The usefulness of the framework is demonstrated in this paper by modeling a new variant of production networks with discrete production processes. One of the main results shows that the visual model is correct with respect to a more traditional quantitative mathematical model. Keywords Production networks · Autonomous units · Discrete production processes · Stability · Graph transformation Mathematics Subject Classification (2000) 39A30 · 90B10 · 90B30 · 90C35