Digital Circuit Petri Nets: A new Petri net type to describe and transform digital circuits for product safety engineering

Abstract

This paper introduces a new type of Petri nets to design digital circuits. Digital Circuit Petri Nets (DCPN) extend standard Petri nets with a bunch of new elements for the net description of input and output points. Additional a hierarchical structure is given to support clear readable designs of Petri nets with many elements. These DCPN will be used to design digital circuits für safety components. Several strategies are presented to generate digital circuits from such a Petri net description. The reachability graph will be used for the most of this strategies. They are implemtented into the Tool “Logical PetriNet”.