Petri Net - Petri Net Basics

Petri Net Basics

A Petri net consists of places, transitions, and arcs. Arcs run from a place to a transition or vice versa, never between places or between transitions. The places from which an arc runs to a transition are called the input places of the transition; the places to which arcs run from a transition are called the output places of the transition.

Graphically, places in a Petri net may contain a discrete number of marks called tokens. Any distribution of tokens over the places will represent a configuration of the net called a marking. In an abstract sense relating to a Petri net diagram, a transition of a Petri net may fire whenever there are sufficient tokens at the start of all input arcs; when it fires, it consumes these tokens, and places tokens at the end of all output arcs. A firing is atomic, i.e., a single non-interruptible step.

Execution of Petri nets is nondeterministic: when multiple transitions are enabled at the same time, any one of them may fire. If a transition is enabled, it may fire, but it doesn't have to.

Since firing is nondeterministic, and multiple tokens may be present anywhere in the net (even in the same place), Petri nets are well suited for modeling the concurrent behavior of distributed systems.