Branching processes of general Petri nets

Abstract

We propose a new model of branching processes, suitable for describing the behavior of general Petri nets, without any finiteness or safeness assumption. In this framework, we define a new class of branching processes and unfoldings of a net N, which we call true. These coincide with the safe branching processes and unfoldings if N is safe, or weakly safe as in [Engelfriet 1991], but not in general. However, true branching processes and processes satisfy the good order-theoretic properties which make the safe processes of safe nets so useful in practice, and which are known not to hold for the safe processes of a general net. True processes represent therefore good candidates to generalize the theory of safe nets to the general case. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.