What is a Petri Net?

Petri Nets is a formal and graphical appealing language which is appropriate for modelling systems with concurrency. Petri Nets has been under development since the beginning of the 60'ies, where Carl Adam Petri defined the language. It was the first time a general theory for discrete parallel systems was formulated. The language is a generalisation of automata theory such that the concept of concurrently occurring events can be expressed.

Petri nets in the World Wide Web

• The Petri Nets Home Page at DAIMI
• Petri net Standardization
• Frequently asked questions with answers
• The Petri Net Newsletter
• Related Conference Announcements and others
• the Petri Net mailing list
• There are a lot of tools available for modeling with and analysis of Petri nets. The Petri Nets Tool database describes many of them. The performance evaluation group at TU Berlin develops and maintains the tool TimeNET, which is especially tailored for analysis and simulation of stochastic Petri nets with non-exponentially distributed firing times of transitions.
• Index of /pub/petrinet at DAIMI
• Queueing Petri nets
• A Petri net classification and related tools

WWW pages of Petri net research groups

• Comprehensive list of reasearch groups at DAIMI
• performance evaluation group (Balbo, Univ. Torino, Italy)
• quantitative techniques group (Beilner, Univ. Dortmund, Germany)
• Telecommunications Systems Engineering Centre (Billington, Univ. of South Australia, Australia)
• Modelling and Simulation (Buchholz, TU Dresden, Germany)
• Applied Computer Science (Desel, Kath. Univ. Eichstätt, Germany)
• theoretical computer science / formal specification group (Ehrig, TU Berlin, Germany)
• theoretical computer science research group (Esparza, TU München, Germany)
• computer architecture group (Fengler, Univ. Ilmenau, Germany)
• distributed systems research group (Haverkort, RWTH Aachen, Germany)
• software dependability engineering reasearch group (Heiner, BTU Cottbus, Germany)
• Computer Architecture and Performance Evaluation (Herzog, Univ. Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany
• performance evaluation research group (Hommel, TU Berlin, Germany)
• Coloured Petri Nets group at DAIMI (Jensen, University of Aarhus, Denmark)
• Networking Research Group (Lakos, University of Tasmania)
• Concurrent Software Systems Laboratory (Murata, University of Illinois at Chicago)
• research group Software engineering and theory of programming I (Reisig, HU Berlin, Germany)
• theoretical computer science group (Rozenberg, Leiden Univ., Netherlands)
• UltraSAN project group (Sanders, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, United States)
• Institute of Control and Automation Engineering (Schnieder, TU Braunschweig)
• system engineering and automation group (Silva, Univ. Zaragoza, Spain)
• research group Automata and Information Systems (Starke, HU Berlin, Germany)
• computer architecture and modelling group (Szczerbicka, Univ. Bremen, Germany)
• Production system research group (Valette, LAAS-CNRS)
• STEP research group (Wolisz, GMD FOKUS, Berlin, Germany)
• graduate course communication-based systems (TU, FU, Humboldt-Universität Berlin, Germany)

GUI APPLICATION HELP

This section will help you navigate through our GUI for Petri Net design.

File Menu

The file menu contains the following options:

• New: Creates a new petri net file.
• Open: Opens a petri net file.
• Print: Prints the petri net.
• Close: Closes the current petri net.
• Save: Saves the petri net that already has a filename.
• Save as: Saves the petri net as another filename.
• Exit: Exits the application.

Help Menu

• About: Displays a window with information on the application.
• Help: Launches the online help page.

Buttons

• Select Shape: Selects a shape for modification.
• Select Circle: Selects a circle for modification.
• Select Square: Selects a square for modification.
• Select Connector: Selects a connector for modification.
• Remove Shape: Removes a shape from the Petri Net.