The main idea behind the series of volumes Advances in Petri Nets is to present to the general computer science community recent results which are the most representative and significant for the development of the area. The papers for the volumes are drawn mainly from the annual International Conferences on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets. Selected papers from the latest conference are independently refereed, and revised and extended as necessary. Some further papers submitted directly to the editor are included. Advances in Petri Nets 1990 covers the Tenth International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets held in Bonn, Germany, in June 1989. Additional highlights of this volume include a tutorial on refinements of Petri nets by W. Brauer, R. Gold, and W. Vogler, and a tutorial on analysis and synthesis of free choice systems by J. Esparza and M. Silva, both prepared in the framework of the ESPRIT Basic Research Actions Project DEMON.

The main aims of the series of volumes "Advances in Petri Nets" are: - to present to the "outside" scientific community a fair picture of recent advances in the area of Petri nets, and - to encourage those interested in the applications and the theory of concurrent systems to take a closer look at Petri nets and then join the group of researchers working in this fascinating and challenging area. This volume is based on the proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets, held in Gjern, Denmark, in June 1991. It contains 18 selected and revised papers covering all aspects of recent Petri net research.

The main idea behind the series of volumes Advances in Petri Nets is to present to the general computer science community recent results which are the most representative and significant for the development of the area. Thepapers for the volumes are drawn mainly from the annual International Conferences on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets. Selected papers from the latest conference are independently refereed, and revised and extended as necessary. Some further papers submitted directly to the editor are included. Advances in Petri Nets 1991 covers the 11th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets held in Paris, France in June 1991. The volume contains the Bibliography of Petri Nets 1990 prepared by H. Pl}nnecke and W. Reisig, with over 4000 entries.

The world is full of events which cause, end or affect other events. The study of these events, from a system point of view, is very important. Such systems are called discrete event dynamic systems and are of a subject of immense interest in a variety of disciplines, which range from telecommunication systems and transport systems to manufacturing systems and beyond. There has always been an intense need to formulate methods for modelling and analysis of discrete event dynamic systems. Petri net is a method which is based on a well-founded mathematical theory and has a wide application. This book is a collection of recent advances in theoretical and practical applications of the Petri net method and can be useful for both academia and industry related practitioners.

Annotation In a component-based approach for system design, one of the difficult problems is how to prove the correctness of the created components. This volume presents a component-based methodology for the creation and verification of design specifications.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets, held in Torino, Italy in June 1995 The 26 revised refereed papers presented were selected from 73 submissions from 22 countries; in addition there are abstracts or full papers of the three invited talks. All theoretical and applicational aspects are addressed by the contributors coming from industry and academia. This volume representatively documents the progress achieved in this application-oriented area of research and development since the predecessor conference held one year earlier.

High-level Petri nets are now widely used in both theoretical analysis and practical modelling of concurrent systems. The main reason for the success of this class of net models is that they make it possible to obtain much more succinct and manageable de scriptions than can be obtained by means of low-level Petri nets-while, on the other hand, they still offer a wide range of analysis methods and tools. The step from low-level nets to high-level nets can be compared to the step from assembly languages to modem programming languages with an elaborated type concept. In low-level nets there is only one kind of token and this means that the state of a place is described by an integer (and in many cases even by a boolean value). In high-level nets each token can carry complex information which, e. g. , may describe the entire state of a process or a data base. Today most practical applications of Petri nets use one of the different kinds of high-level nets. A considerable body of knowledge exists about high-level Petri nets this includes theoretical foundations, analysis methods and many applications. Unfortunately, the papers on high-level Petri nets have been scattered throughout various journals and collections. As a result, much of this knowledge is not readily available to people who may be interested in using high-level nets.

The volume provides a comprehensive, up-to-date account on recent developments concerning the incorporation of fuzzy capabilities in Petri Net models. The results of such studies originated the class of models that have been designated by Fuzzy Petri Nets. The recent papers specially elaborated for this volume range over several aspects of fuzziness in Petri nets. They form an interesting collection of original works that covers a great variety of relevant problems concerning the concept of Fuzzy Petri Net model. The articles approach several of the most outstanding issues in the framework of Fuzzy Petri nets, such as the representation of time, consistency checking, learning, design, computational efficiency, modelling flexibility, among others. From the material collected in the book one can extract the points of view of leading researchers concerning the basic and advanced concepts, advantages, potential applications and open problems, related to the field.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Application and Theory of Petri Nets, ICATPN'97, held in Toulouse, France, in June 1997. The 22 revised full papers presented in the volume were selected from a total of 61 submissions; also included are three invited contributions. All relevant topics in the area are addressed. Besides a variety of Petri net classes, workflow management, telecommunication networking, constraint satisfaction, program semantics, concurrency, and temporal logic are among the topics addressed.