Basic Introduction To PETRI NETS

Introduction

Operation and design of information and engineering systems constitute two important areas of research. The recent chapter focuses on bridging the gap among these two vitally intrinsically and imperative related research topics. Engineer's implementation and engineering design specialists have begun to understand the need of comprising the formal models in their design or implementation aspects because of their numerous advantages over individual and complicated simulation program building from scratch. Employing these formal techniques and models, we can shorten the complexities pertaining to generation of software. A system modeling via these formal approaches enjoys given advantages:

(a) Free of logical errors, and

(b) Different qualitative system properties can be confirmed more easily from such modelling approach quite than from the individual programs built from scratch.

Generally, systems make state transitions only while the events associated along with occupied states happen. Any process inside a real system may be sub-divided into a sequence of state transitions or and that system itself is named as a discrete event system. A discrete event system is marked by the stochastic state transitions that arise at a raising sequence of times. The building block for the proper or formal modelling of such type of discrete event systems is given by the "generalized semi-Markov process" or GSMP. Petri nets are formal graphical modelling tools well appropriate to describe distributed and concurrent system such exhibit synchronization and cooperation. They are widely employed tools for modelling and simulation of discrete manufacturing systems and form a visual representation of generalized semi-Markov process.

Currently Petri nets modelling or simulation and net theory have become popular between the researcher community as a significant computational paradigm to shown and analyze a broad class of systems. The net theory gives a graphical language to interpret, communicate and visualize engineering problems and a specification engineering language also which can be employed as an implementation tool for enhancement and simulation causes, thus serving as a computational paradigm of the intelligent system. Petri nets have a capability to easily show and analyze a system that possesses the given three characteristics:

a)      Concurrency,

b)      Synchronisation, and

c)      Randomness

The approach of Petri nets can be simply combined along with other popular techniques often employed in defining real systems. The theories of object oriented programming, fuzzy sets and neural networks are only some to mention in between them. These modified Petri nets have found its application broadly in the field of computer systems, process control, robotic systems, manufacturing systems, knowledge based systems, and a broad variety of engineering applications.