Petri net
family of modelling languages for distributed systems
A Petri net, also known as a place/transition net (PT net), is one of several mathematical modeling languages for the description of distributed systems. It is a class of discrete event dynamic system. A Petri net is a directed bipartite graph that has two types of elements: places and transitions. Place elements are depicted as white circles and transition elements are depicted as rectangles.
A place can contain any number of tokens, depicted as black circles. A transition is enabled if all places connected to it as inputs contain at least one token.
Like industry standards such as UML activity diagrams, Business Process Model and Notation, and event-driven process chains, Petri nets offer a graphical notation for stepwise processes that include choice, iteration, and concurrent execution. Unlike these standards, Petri nets have an exact mathematical definition of their execution semantics, with a well-developed mathematical theory for process analysis.
Historical background
The German computer scientist Carl Adam Petri, after whom such structures are named, analyzed Petri nets extensively in his 1962 Ph. D. dissertation (Petri 1962).
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