An integrated environment for Petri net slicing

Abstract

Petri net slicing is a technique to automatically isolate the part of a marked Petri net that influences or is influenced by a given set of places. There exist different algorithms for Petri net slicing with different objectives. Nevertheless, they have never been evaluated or compared from a practical point of view. In fact, because there does not exist a public implementation of some of them, their performance and scalability have remained unknown. In this paper we present three tools for the analysis and transformation of Petri nets. The three tools are complementary, and they allow us to extract from a Petri net a set of slices that preserve a given set of properties (e.g., boundedness, reversibility, etc.). For this, they include the first public, free, and open-source implementation of the most important algorithms for Petri net slicing, including a new algorithm that reduces the size of the slices. Our implementation of the algorithms allowed us to compare all of them and to measure and report for the first time about their individual performance.