Petri Nets: Properties, Analysis and Appl K a T Ions Tadao Murata, Fellow, Ieee Invited Paper

This is an invited tutorial-review paper on Petri nets-a graphical and mathematical modeling tool. Petri nets are a promising tool for describing and studying information processing systems that are characterized as being concurrent, asynchronous, distributed, parallel, nondeterministic, and/or stochastic. The paper starts with a brief review of the history and the application areas considered in the literature. It then proceeds with introductory modeling examples, behavioral and structural properties, three methods of analysis, subclasses of Petri nets and their analysis. In particular, one section is devoted to marked graphsthe concurrent system model most amenable to analysis. In addition, the paper presents introductory discussions on stochastic nets with their application to performance modeling, and on high-level nets with their application to logic programming. Also included are recent results on reachability criteria. Suggestions are provided for further reading on many subject areas of Petri nets.