An Investigation of Coloured Petri Nets:Automated Part Cutting Case Study

Abstract

Petri nets are a graphical construction with clearly de ned semantics which can model concurrent communicating systems in a formal manner similar to the way that automata theory can model formal language theory(Petri, 1962). As Dr. Carl Petri found the existing automata insu cient or too cumbersome for describing communicating systems others have found Petri Nets to be too cumbersome for e ectively reasoning about sophisticated, real world systems. In some cases these di culties were overcome by extending the theory of Petri Nets. Dr. Kurt Jensen developed the theory of Coloured Petri Nets (Jensen, 1981) for the purpose of generalizing and simplifying complex Petri Net models. This work incorporates Coloured Petri Nets and other theoretical extensions to describe a real world automated steel cutting system. During the course of this investigation the paper will formalize colours in the language of algebras and examine patterns related to timing conditions.