An introduction to the practical use of coloured Petri Nets

Abstract

The development of Coloured Petri Nets (CP-nets or CPN) has been driven by the desire to develop a modelling language - at the same time theoretically well-founded and versatile enough to be used in practice for systems of the size and complexity found in typical industrial projects. To achieve this, we have combined the strength of Petri nets with the strength of programming languages. Petri nets provide the primitives for describing synchronisation of concurrent processes, while programming languages provide the primitives for definition of data types and manipulation of their data values.