5. Petri nets

5.1 History

Petri nets are a recent invention, having been defined for the first time in a thesis presented in the early 1960s. Note that, as the inventor was German, Petri must be written without an acute accent on the vowel e. The original aim was not at all operational safety, but the graphical representation of the behavior of finite-state automata. Today, this is still the main use, and the majority of theoretical work on the subject concerns their use in formal verification of the correct operation of automata. A tangible manifestation of this is the standardization of a form of Petri net for automata specification under the name GRAFCET [5]. As a result, an Internet search is rather disappointing for our purposes, as the vast majority of references found are related to their...