Special section of SoSyM dedicated to 50 years of Petri nets

Excerpt

Very few concepts of computer science are so closely linked to the names of their creators as Petri nets are to their inventor Carl Adam Petri. More than 50 years ago, in June 1962, he laid the foundation for a modeling technique that has been continuously worked on ever since. With his stable foundation, numerous and broadly applicable concepts and techniques, special cases, generalizations and adaptations, Petri nets are used in a variety of fields inside and outside computer science. Just as finite automata and their numerous variants are the formal basis for many modeling languages for sequential systems, Petri nets are a basic and precise description of essential concepts and phenomena of discrete distributed systems, which implicitly or explicitly influenced many custom-designed modeling languages. Efficient techniques for proving and checking relevant properties of a system model can be transferred from Petri nets to other modeling languages. The same is true for information and results on those properties that cannot be ascertained or require a very high algorithmic effort. Thus, results of Petri net theory are relevant in many areas where the name “Petri” is not explicitly mentioned. Vice versa, new and custom-designed problems are often easier to analyze and solve in the more general context of Petri nets. …