Introductory Chapter: Petri Nets in Science and Engineering

Abstract

The Petri nets are one of the most widely used methods for the study of the dynamics that falls within the category of Discrete Event Systems (DES) [1]. The DES is a class of systems that are guided by the occurrence of events asynchronous in time, which are becoming more and more relevant nowadays. The Petri nets are graphically represented as a directed graph, with two classes of nodes, called places and transitions. The places allow capturing the state of a system. They also represent the conditions required by the events to occur, or to execute, in the DES.