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Petri nets: Basic notions, structure, behaviour

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Current Trends in Concurrency

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 224))

Abstract

We give a sketch of the theory of Petri nets. The aspects that we concentrate on are the basic notions of the theory and the interplay between the structure and behaviour of distributed systems as modelled by Petri nets. The theory we present is confined to a restricted class of Petri nets called safe Petri nets which correspond essentially to systems that have finite state spaces.

Starting with an elementary system model based on safe nets we first introduce the basic notions of net theory such as sequence, conflict, concurrency and confusion. We then introduce a number of (increasingly sophisticated) behavioural notions such as firing sequences, traces and processes. Next we identify a number of structural subclasses of safe Petri nets and show how they guarantee behavioural properties such as sequentiality, determinism and lack of confusion. We then present the major results concerning these subclasses. Towards the end of the paper we give a quick sketch of the theory of non-sequential processes based on Petri nets. We also show one way of generalizing the elementary system model considered in the paper so that powerful net-based tools for modelling and analysing large scale distributed systems may be constructed.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Leiden, 2300 RA, Leiden, The Netherlands

    G. Rozenberg

  2. Computer Science Department, Aarhus University, DK - 8000, Århus C, Denmark

    P. S. Thiagarajan

Authors
  1. G. Rozenberg
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  2. P. S. Thiagarajan
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J. W. de Bakker W. -P. de Roever G. Rozenberg

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© 1986 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Rozenberg, G., Thiagarajan, P.S. (1986). Petri nets: Basic notions, structure, behaviour. In: de Bakker, J.W., de Roever, W.P., Rozenberg, G. (eds) Current Trends in Concurrency. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 224. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0027048

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0027048

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-16488-3

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-39827-1

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