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Petri Nets

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Place transition nets; Condition event nets; Colored nets

Definition

The Petri net formalism provides a graphical but also formal language which is appropriate for modeling systems and processes with concurrency and resource sharing. It was introduced in the beginning of the 1960's by Carl Adam Petri and was the first formalism to adequately describe concurrency. The classical Petri net is a directed bipartite graph with two node types called places and transitions. The nodes are connected via directed arcs. Places are represented by circles and transitions by rectangles. The network structure of the Petri net is static. However, places may contain tokens and the distribution of tokens of places may change as described in the firing rule. Petri nets have formal semantics and allow for all kinds of analysis. Moreover, due to the strong theoretical foundation much is known about the properties of different subclasses of Petri nets. Petri nets have been extended in many...

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Recommended Reading

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  8. van der Aalst W.M.P. and Hee K.M. van Workflow Management: Models, Methods, and Systems. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2004.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Eindhoven University of Technology, Eindhoven, The Netherlands

    W. M. P. van der Aalst

Authors
  1. W. M. P. van der Aalst
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology, 266 Ferst Drive, 30332-0765, Atlanta, GA, USA

    LING LIU (Professor) (Professor)

  2. Database Research Group David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, 200 University Avenue West, N2L 3G1, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    M. TAMER ÖZSU (Professor and Director, University Research Chair) (Professor and Director, University Research Chair)

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© 2009 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

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van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2009). Petri Nets. In: LIU, L., ÖZSU, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-39940-9_817

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