Extended time Petri nets

Abstract

In many complex systems that can be modeled using Petri nets time can be a very important factor which should be taken into account during creation and analysis of the model. Time data can describe starting moments of some actions or their duration before their immediate effects start to influence some other areas of the modeled system. Places in a Petri net often describe static components of the system, but they can also describe states. Such a state can have time restrictions, for example, telling how long it can influence other elements in the model. Time values describing some system may be inconsistent or incomplete, which can cause problems during the creation of the model. In this paper, a new extension of time Petri nets is proposed, which allows the creation of models with different types of time data, which previously were possible to be properly used in separate types of well-known time Petri nets. The proposed new time Petri net solves this problem by integrating different aspects of already existing time Petri nets into one unified net.