The world is full of events which cause, end or affect other events. The study of these events, from a system point of view, is very important. Such systems are called discrete event dynamic systems and are of a subject of immense interest in a variety of disciplines, which range from telecommunication systems and transport systems to manufacturing systems and beyond. There has always been an intense need to formulate methods for modelling and analysis of discrete event dynamic systems. Petri net is a method which is based on a well-founded mathematical theory and has a wide application. This book is a collection of recent advances in theoretical and practical applications of the Petri net method and can be useful for both academia and industry related practitioners.

The main aims of the series of volumes "Advances in Petri Nets" are: - to present to the "outside" scientific community a fair picture of recent advances in the area of Petri nets, and - to encourage those interested in the applications and the theory of concurrent systems to take a closer look at Petri nets and then join the group of researchers working in this fascinating and challenging area. This volume is based on the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets, held in Gjern, Denmark, in June 1991. It contains 18 selected and revised papers covering all aspects of recent Petri net research.

The main idea behind the series of volumes Advances in Petri Nets is to present to the general computer science community recent results which are the most representative and significant for the development of the area. Thepapers for the volumes are drawn mainly from the annual International Conferences on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets. Selected papers from the latest conference are independently refereed, and revised and extended as necessary. Some further papers submitted directly to the editor are included. Advances in Petri Nets 1991 covers the 11th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets held in Paris, France in June 1991. The volume contains the Bibliography of Petri Nets 1990 prepared by H. Pl}nnecke and W. Reisig, with over 4000 entries.

This book presents a coherent description of the theoretical and practical aspects of Coloured Petri Nets (CP-nets or CPN). It shows how CP-nets have been de veloped - from being a promising theoretical model to being a full-fledged lan guage for the design, specification, simulation, validation and implementation of large software systems (and other systems in which human beings and/or com puters communicate by means of some more or less formal rules). The book contains the formal definition of CP-nets and the mathematical theory behind their analysis methods. However, it has been the intention to write the book in such a way that it also becomes attractive to readers who are more interested in applications than the underlying mathematics. This means that a large part of the book is written in a style which is closer to an engineering textbook (or a users' manual) than it is to a typical textbook in theoretical computer science. The book consists of three separate volumes. The first volume defines the net model (i. e. , hierarchical CP-nets) and the basic concepts (e. g. , the different behavioural properties such as deadlocks, fair ness and home markings). It gives a detailed presentation of many small exam ples and a brief overview of some industrial applications. It introduces the for mal analysis methods. Finally, it contains a description of a set of CPN tools which support the practical use of CP-nets.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets, ICATPN 2004, held in Bologna, Italy in June 2004. The 19 revised full regular papers and 5 revised tool presentation papers presented together with 6 invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 62 submissions. All current issues on research and development in the area of Petri nets are addressed, in particular concurrent systems design and analysis, modular systems development, formal specification, model validation, model checking, workflow management, flow charts, networking, formal methods in software engineering, etc.

High-level Petri nets are now widely used in both theoretical analysis and practical modelling of concurrent systems. The main reason for the success of this class of net models is that they make it possible to obtain much more succinct and manageable de scriptions than can be obtained by means of low-level Petri nets-while, on the other hand, they still offer a wide range of analysis methods and tools. The step from low-level nets to high-level nets can be compared to the step from assembly languages to modem programming languages with an elaborated type concept. In low-level nets there is only one kind of token and this means that the state of a place is described by an integer (and in many cases even by a boolean value). In high-level nets each token can carry complex information which, e. g. , may describe the entire state of a process or a data base. Today most practical applications of Petri nets use one of the different kinds of high-level nets. A considerable body of knowledge exists about high-level Petri nets this includes theoretical foundations, analysis methods and many applications. Unfortunately, the papers on high-level Petri nets have been scattered throughout various journals and collections. As a result, much of this knowledge is not readily available to people who may be interested in using high-level nets.

This volume contains the proceedings of the 14th International Conference onApplication and Theory of Petri Nets. The aim of the Petri net conferences is to create a forum for discussing progress in the application and theory of Petri nets. Typically, the conferences have 150-200 participants, one third of whom come from industry, while the rest are from universities and research institutes. The volume includes three invited papers, "Modeling and enactment of workflow systems" (C.A. Ellis, G.J. Nutt), "Interleaving functional and performance structural analysis of net models" (M. Silva), and "FSPNs: fluid stochastic Petri nets" (K.S. Trivedi, V.G. Kulkarni), together with 26 full papers (selected from 102 submissions) and 6 project papers.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Application and Theory of Petri Nets, ICATPN'97, held in Toulouse, France, in June 1997. The 22 revised full papers presented in the volume were selected from a total of 61 submissions; also included are three invited contributions. All relevant topics in the area are addressed. Besides a variety of Petri net classes, workflow management, telecommunication networking, constraint satisfaction, program semantics, concurrency, and temporal logic are among the topics addressed.

For some years, specification of software and hardware systems has been influenced not only by algebraic methods but also by new developments in logic. These new developments in logic are partly based on the use of algorithmic techniques in deduction and proving methods, but are alsodue to new theoretical advances, to a great extent stimulated by computer science, which have led to new types of logic and new logical calculi. The new techniques, methods and tools from logic, combined with algebra-based ones, offer very powerful and useful tools for the computer scientist, which may soon become practical for commercial use, where, in particular, more powerful specification tools are needed for concurrent and distributed systems. This volume contains papers based on lectures by leading researchers which were originally given at an international summer school held in Marktoberdorf in 1991. The papers aim to give a foundation for combining logic and algebra for the purposes of specification under the aspects of automated deduction, proving techniques, concurrency and logic, abstract data types and operational semantics, and constructive methods.