Petri nets and higher-dimensional automata
In Proceedings of the 46th international conference on application and theory of petri nets and concurrency (PetriNet’25)
Abstract
Petri nets and their variants are often considered through their interleaved semantics, i.e., considering executions where, at each step, a single transition fires. This is clearly a miss, as Petri nets are a true concurrency model. This paper revisits the semantics of Petri nets as higher-dimensional automata (HDAs) as introduced by van Glabbeek, which methodically take concurrency into account. We extend the translation to include some common features. We consider nets with inhibitor arcs, under both concurrent semantics used in the literature, and generalized self-modifying nets. Finally, we present a tool that implements our translations.