Coloured Petri nets

Abstract

This paper describes a Petri net model, called Coloured Petri nets (CP-nets), where information is attached to each token. The information can be inspected and modified when a transition fires. For most applications, this generalization of ordinary Petri nets allows the user to make more manageable descriptions, due to the fact that equal subnets can be folded into each other, yielding a much smaller net. The paper investigates how to analyse Coloured Petri nets. It turns out that placeinvariants and reachability trees, two of the most important methods for ordinary Petri nets, can be generalized to apply for Coloured Petri nets.

Coloured Petri nets and Predicate/transition-nets are very closely related to each other, in the sense that Coloured Petri nets have been developed as a modification of Predicate/transition-nets, in order to avoid some technical problems which arise when the method of place-invariants is generalized to apply for Predicate/transition-nets.