A tool for teaching Petri nets

  • Authors:

  • Chao Mei;Xiaoyang Zhang;Wenfei Zhao;Kasi Periyasamy;Mark Headington

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI;University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI;University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI;University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI;University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, WI

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

Petri nets are a notation used to model and analyze the behavior of concurrent and distributed systems. They are used in many applications such as work flow descriptions and, recently, in certain medical applications. This paper describes the development of a Petri net tool that is mainly intended to teach Petri nets to beginners. Consequently, the authors focused more on making the tool relatively simple to use yet sufficiently detailed to aid in understanding the important concepts of Petri nets. The tool was developed in Java and uses XML notation for storing the underlying representations; hence, it is easily portable to several platforms. The paper includes a simple case study on the model of a vending machine to illustrate the expressive power of the tool. A brief discussion on continuing work on the tool is also included.