DFG Forschergruppe Petri Net Technology (PNT) sponsored by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)

Project Overview

The research group Petri Net Technology is a cooperation between three groups from the Technical University Berlin and the Humboldt University Berlin. The goal of the project is to point out and elaborate methods, actions and techniques appropriate for industrial sized applications.

These techniques will be comprised in a Petri net construction kit. This construction kit consists of individual building blocks along with a set of rules for combining some of them with respect to a specific application field. Experiences already made in three typical case studies of different application areas form the basis for the selection of the building blocks.

The three subgroups of the project are:

Net based software development (NSE):
Prof. Dr. H. Weber, TU Berlin

• A process model is aspired for developing future software systems. Such a model is based on the systematical use (maybe of different types) of Petri nets over all (respectively most) system development steps. Furthermore the integration of Petri net techniques with other formal or semi-formal description techniques will be examined.

Universal approach to net based system description (UBS):
Prof. Dr. H. Ehrig, TU Berlin

• The main aim is to provide an universal approach to description and classification of Petri nets and net based systems in a uniform framework. This approach includes pragmatic and semantic aspects of net structure formalisms, data type description techniques, horizontal and vertical structuring principles and transformation between different net classes.

Theory based Petri net applications (TheoPAn):
Prof. Dr. W. Reisig, HU Berlin

• Theoretical and algorithmical aspects of Petri net theory are applied to industrial sized examples. To cooperate with industry the used formalisms must be simple. Specification and verification concepts such as temporal logic, analysis and simulation techniques for Petri nets play a major role.