Symbolic computation of Petri nets

Abstract

Petri nets are receiving increasing attention from the scientific community during the last few years. They provide the users with a powerful formalism for describing and analyzing a variety of information processing systems such as finite-state machines, concurrent systems, multiprocessors and parallel computation, formal languages, communication protocols, etc. Although the mathematical theory of Petri nets has been intensively analyzed from several points of view, the symbolic computation of these nets is still a challenge, particularly for general-purpose computer algebra systems (CAS). In this paper, a new Mathematica package for dealing with some Petri nets is introduced.