An Introduction to High-Level Petri Nets

Abstract

This paper describes a Petri net model, where information is attached to each token and when a transition fires, it can inspect and modify the information. The model is based on predicate/transitions (Genrich and Lautenbach) and on coloured Petri nets (Jensen).

This generalization of ordinary Petri nets allows, for many applications, more manageable descriptions, due to the fact that equal subnets can be folded into each other yielding a much smaller net. The paper investigates how to analyse high-level Petri nets, and it turns out that invariants and reachability trees, two of the most important methods for ordinary Petri nets, can be generalized to apply for high-level Petri Nets.