A framework for the definition of variants of high-level Petri nets

There exist many different variants of high-level Petri nets. Many differences between these variants, however, do not concern the features of the particular versions of Petri nets, but they concern the data types that can be defined and used in the different variants of high-level nets. One famous example of a restricted version of high-level nets are well-formed nets (which are currently standardised as symmetric nets in ISO/IEC 15909-1), which basically restrict the data types to finite sets with a very limited set of operations on them.

Due to these restrictions, there exist some more powerful analysis algorithms for symmetric nets. During the standardisation of high-level nets and some of their variations, it turned out that defining the legal data types and the operations on them is the most difficult part. In particular, these definitions become lengthy and mix Petri net specific issues with data-type specific issues, which often blocks the view for the really relevant parts.

Even worse, supposedly simpler versions of high-level nets often are more difficult to define than high-level nets in general. This paper introduces the concepts and the mathematical tools to ease the definition of new variants and versions of high-level Petri nets: a framework for defining variants of high-level nets.

The main ingredient of this framework is the concept of generators, which we recently introduced for formalising modular PNML, and the newly introduced concept of constructs.