Clock Transition Systems

The objective of the paper is to introduce a new model capable of modeling both Time Petri Nets (TPNs) and Networks of Timed Automata (NTA). We called it Clock Transition System (CTS). This new model incorporates the advantages of the structure of Petri nets, while introducing explicitly the concept of clocks. Transitions in the network can be guarded by an expression on the clocks and reset a subset of them as in timed automata. The urgency may be introduced by a separate description of invariants. We show that CTS allow to express TPNs (even when unbounded) and NTA. For those two classical models, we identify subclasses of CTSs equivalent by isomorphism of their operational semantics and provide (syntactic) translations. The classical state-space computation developed for NTA and then adapted to TPNs can easily be defined for general CTSs. Armed with these merits, the CTS model seems a good candidate to serve as an intermediate theoretical and practical model to factor out the upcoming developments in the TPNs and the NTA scientific communities.