Petri Net - Extensions

Extensions

There are many extensions to Petri nets. Some of them are completely backwards-compatible (e.g. coloured Petri nets) with the original Petri net, some add properties that cannot be modelled in the original Petri net (e.g. timed Petri nets). If they can be modelled in the original Petri net, they are not real extensions, instead, they are convenient ways of showing the same thing, and can be transformed with mathematical formulas back to the original Petri net, without losing any meaning. Extensions that cannot be transformed are sometimes very powerful, but usually lack the full range of mathematical tools available to analyse normal Petri nets.

The term high-level Petri net is used for many Petri net formalisms that extend the basic P/T net formalism; this includes coloured Petri nets, hierarchical Petri nets, and all other extensions sketched in this section. The term is also used specifically for the type of coloured nets supported by CPN Tools.

A short list of possible extensions:

• Additional types of arcs; two common types are:
  • a reset arc does not impose a precondition on firing, and empties the place when the transition fires; this makes reachability undecidable, while some other properties, such as termination, remain decidable;
  • an inhibitor arc imposes the precondition that the transition may only fire when the place is empty; this allows arbitrary computations on numbers of tokens to be expressed, which makes the formalism Turing complete.
• In a standard Petri net, tokens are indistinguishable. In a Coloured Petri Net, every token has a value. In popular tools for coloured Petri nets such as CPN Tools, the values of tokens are typed, and can be tested (using guard expressions) and manipulated with a functional programming language. A subsidiary of coloured Petri nets are the well-formed Petri nets, where the arc and guard expressions are restricted to make it easier to analyse the net.

• Another popular extension of Petri nets is hierarchy; this in the form of different views supporting levels of refinement and abstraction was studied by Fehling. Another form of hierarchy is found in so-called object Petri nets or object systems where a Petri net can contain Petri nets as its tokens inducing a hierarchy of nested Petri nets that communicate by synchronisation of transitions on different levels. See for an informal introduction to object Petri nets.

• A Vector Addition System with States (VASS) can be seen as a generalisation of a Petri net. Consider a finite state automaton where each transition is labelled by a transition from the Petri net. The Petri net is then synchronised with the finite state automaton, i.e., a transition in the automaton is taken at the same time as the corresponding transition in the Petri net. It is only possible to take a transition in the automaton if the corresponding transition in the Petri net is enabled, and it is only possible to fire a transition in the Petri net if there is a transition from the current state in the automaton labelled by it. (The definition of VASS is usually formulated slightly differently.)

• Prioritised Petri nets add priorities to transitions, whereby a transition cannot fire, if a higher-priority transition is enabled (i.e. can fire). Thus, transitions are in priority groups, and e.g. priority group 3 can only fire if all transitions are disabled in groups 1 and 2. Within a priority group, firing is still non-deterministic.

• The non-deterministic property has been a very valuable one, as it lets the user abstract a large number of properties (depending on what the net is used for). In certain cases, however, the need arises to also model the timing, not only the structure of a model. For these cases, timed Petri nets have evolved, where there are transitions that are timed, and possibly transitions which are not timed (if there are, transitions that are not timed have a higher priority than timed ones). A subsidiary of timed Petri nets are the stochastic Petri nets that add nondeterministic time through adjustable randomness of the transitions. The exponential random distribution is usually used to 'time' these nets. In this case, the nets' reachability graph can be used as a Markov chain.

• Dualistic Petri Nets (dP-Nets) is a Petri Net extension developed by E. Dawis, et al. to better represent real-world process. dP-Nets balance the duality of change/no-change, action/passivity, (transformation) time/space, etc., between the bipartite Petri Net constructs of transformation and place resulting in the unique characteristic of transformation marking, i.e., when the transformation is "working" it is marked. This allows for the transformation to fire (or be marked) multiple times representing the real-world behavior of process throughput. Marking of the transformation assumes that transformation time must be greater than zero. A zero transformation time used in many typical Petri Nets may be mathematically appealing but impractical in representing real-world processes. dP-Nets also exploit the power of Petri Nets' hierarchical abstraction to depict Process architecture. Complex process systems are modeled as a series of simpler nets interconnected through various levels of hierarchical abstraction. The process architecture of a packet switch is demonstrated in, where development requirements are organized around the structure of the designed system. dP-Nets allow any real-world process, such as computer systems, business processes, traffic flow, etc., to be modeled, studied, and improved.

There are many more extensions to Petri nets, however, it is important to keep in mind, that as the complexity of the net increases in terms of extended properties, the harder it is to use standard tools to evaluate certain properties of the net. For this reason, it is a good idea to use the most simple net type possible for a given modelling task.