A brief introduction to coloured petri nets

Abstract

Coloured Petri Nets (CP-nets or CPN) is a graphical oriented language for design, specification, simulation and verification of systems. It is in particular well-suited for systems in which communication, synchronisation and resource sharing are important. Typical examples of application areas are communication protocols, distributed systems, imbedded systems, automated production systems, work flow analysis and VLSI chips. The development of CP-nets 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 we find 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 the description of the synchronisation of concurrent processes, while programming languages provide the primitives for the definition of data types and the manipulation of data values.