Introducing Petri nets

Modern manufacturing systems are highly parallel and distributed. They need to be analyzed from qualitative and quantitative points of view. Qualitative analysis looks for properties like the absence of deadlocks, the absence of (store) overflows, or the presence of certain mutual exclusions in the use of shared resources (e.g. a robot). Its ultimate goal is to prove the correctness of the modeled system. Quantitative analysis looks for performance properties (e.g. throughput), responsiveness properties (e.g. average completion times) or utilization properties (e.g. average queue lengths or utilization rates). In other words, the quantitative analysis concerns the evaluation of the efficiency of the modeled system.