History of Petri Nets
Petri nets were originally developed in the 60'ies and the 70'ies, and they were soon recognised as being one of the most adequate and sound languages for description and analysis of synchronisation, communication and resource sharing between concurrent processes. However, attempts to use Petri nets in practice revealed two serious drawbacks. First of all, there were no data concepts and hence the models often became excessively large, because all data manipulation had to be represented directly into the net structure (i.e., by means of places and transitions). Secondly, there were no hierarchy concepts, and thus it was not possible to build a large model via a set of separate submodels with well-defined interfaces.The development of high-level Petri nets in the late 70'ies and hierarchical Petri nets in the late 80'ies removed these two serious problems. Coloured Petri Nets (also called CP-nets or CPN) is one of the two most well-known dialects of high-level Petri nets. CP-nets incorporate both data structuring and hierarchical decomposition - without compromising the qualities of the original Petri nets.
Last modified: Fri Dec 5 13:22:10 1997 -- CP-nets Webmaster