Comparing the Expressiveness of Timed Automata and Timed Extensions of Petri Nets

Time dependant models have been intensively studied for many reasons, among others because of their applications in software verification and due to the development of embedded platforms where reliability and safety depend to a large extent on the time features. Many of the time dependant models were suggested as real-time extensions of several well-known untimed models. The most studied formalisms include Networks of Timed Automata which extend the model of communicating finite-state machines with a finite number of real-valued clocks, and timed extensions of Petri nets where the added time constructs include e.g. time intervals that are assigned to the transitions (Time Petri Nets) or to the arcs (Timed-Arc Petri Nets). In this paper, we shall semiformally introduce these models, discuss their strengths and weaknesses, and provide an overview of the known results about the relationships among the models.