The individual and collective token interpretations of Petri nets

  • Authors:

  • Robert Jan van Glabbeek

  • Affiliations:

  • National ICT Australia, and School of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of New South Wales

  • Venue:
  • CONCUR 2005 - Concurrency Theory
  • Year:
  • 2005

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Abstract

Starting from the opinion that the standard firing rule of Petri nets embodies the collective token interpretation of nets rather than their individual token interpretation, I propose a new firing rule that embodies the latter. Also variants of both firing rules for the self-sequential interpretation of nets are studied. Using these rules, I express the four computational interpretations of Petri nets by semantic mappings from nets to labelled step transition systems, the latter being event-oriented representations of higher dimensional automata. This paper totally orders the expressive power of the four interpretations, measured in terms of the classes of labelled step transition systems up to isomorphism of reachable parts that can be denoted by nets under each of the interpretations. Furthermore, I extend the unfolding construction of place/transition nets into occurrence net to nets that may have transitions without incoming arcs.