Branching processes of general Petri nets

Jean-Michel Couvreur (1) , Denis Poitrenaud (2) , Pascal Weil (3)

1 LIFO - Laboratoire d'Informatique Fondamentale d'Orléans
2 LIP6 - Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6
3 LaBRI - Laboratoire Bordelais de Recherche en Informatique

We propose a new model of branching processes, suitable for describing the behavior of general Petri nets, without any finiteness or safeness assumption. In this framework, we define a new class of branching processes and unfoldings of a net N, which we call true. These coincide with the safe branching processes and unfoldings if N is safe, or weakly safe as in [Engelfriet 1991], but not in general. However, true branching processes and processes satisfy the good order-theoretic properties which make the safe processes of safe nets so useful in practice, and which are known not to hold for the safe processes of a general net. True processes represent therefore good candidates to generalize the theory of safe nets to the general case.

Mots clés: General Petri nets; unfoldings; branching processes

Domaines: Calcul parallèle, distribué et partagé [cs.DC]

Jean-Michel Couvreur, Denis Poitrenaud, Pascal Weil. Branching processes of general Petri nets. Fundamenta Informaticae, 2012. ⟨hal-00688138v1⟩