Computation of enabled transition instances for colored Petri nets

Computation of enabled transition instances is a key but difficult problem of animation of colored Petri nets. To address it in our colored Petri net tool, we give an algorithm for computing enabled transition instances. This algorithm is based on pattern matching. So it first tries to bind tokens to variables covered by patterns. If some variables are not covered by any pattern, the algorithm will bind all the colors in the corresponding color sets to the variables. This algorithm uses the new principle of partial binding partial test and adopts some optimization techniques for preprocessing to improve efficiency. The principle of partial binding partial test allows us to test the expressions during the partial binding process so as to prone invalid bindings as early as possible. The preprocessing with optimization techniques not only prunes a lot of invalid potential bindings before the binding begins, but also finds disabled transitions at an early phase.