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Petri Nets

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Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Colored nets; Condition event nets; Place transition 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 1960s 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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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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Corresponding author

Correspondence to W. M. P. van der Aalst .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Dept. di Elettronica e Informazione, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32, 20133, Milan, Italy

    Barbara Pernici

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van der Aalst, W.M.P. (2016). Petri Nets. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_817-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_817-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

  • eBook Packages: Springer Reference Computer SciencesReference Module Computer Science and Engineering

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