Computational analysis of a power distribution system with Petri nets

Abstract

Petri nets provide a simple yet very intuitive graphical model for processes such as concurrency, parallelism and synchronization. Furthermore, they have a solid mathematical foundation and a number of analysis methods available. Due to these reasons, Petri nets are especially suited for the analysis of large and complex systems. In this paper we apply the Petri nets formalism to represent and analyze a power distribution system. To this aim, we report briefly a Mathematica package developed by the authors to deal with Petri nets. The package is subsequently applied to determine the possible scenarios of a failure of the system and some associated behaviors. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.