Essential Features of Petri Nets

Abstract

In this chapter a basic model is introduced by extracting information from an intuitive example, given in this section. By doing this some essential features of Petri nets will appear, namely the principles of locality, concurrency, graphical and algebraic representation. For illustration we choose an example where several objects are subject to a coordination procedure. Similar examples can be found in various other fields, e.g. from computer integrated manufacturing to office automation. In our example, a race among a number of cars is started. When the starter receives ready signs from all cars, he gives the starting signal and the cars begin the race. For simplicity, we restrict the example to one starter and two racing cars (Figure 2.1) .