Petri net drawing and code generation

automation code-generation metaprogramming petri-net
Hernán Eche picture Hernán Eche · Feb 9, 2011 · Viewed 8.4k times · Source

Is there any software for drawing a Petri net and generating any source code from there? The source code could be in any already known programming language...

Slightly less desirable option would be outputting a file with only the description of the Petri net graphs in a text-based file in some open format, like XML or any other data language. I could then write the code generator myself, but at least I would like to avoid gui/graph development part ;))

Thanks

Answer

Boris Stitnicky picture Boris Stitnicky · May 25, 2013

I am developing y_petri in Ruby. At the moment being, YPetri can handle visualization (YPetri::Net class has #visualize method using Graphviz to draw the net), but not the GUI editing you seem to have in mind. FYI, firstly, GUI editing in Petri nets is less important than it seems.

The data language in use is Ruby itself (more precisely, and internal DSL written in Ruby).

A major issue with Petri nets is, that there is entirely too many kinds of them in existence. YPetri attempts to be a universal Petri net framework, with 1 kind of places (of arbitrary marking type) and 4 basic types of transitions (timed / timeless x stoichiometric / non-stoichiometric). In addition, there is a fifth kind of transition, assignment transition, that replaces the target places' marking with the return value of its function. I believe that this can be used to describe any dynamic system whatsoever, while being as parsimonious as I was able to make it.

Petri net arcs are understood as relations between transitions and places (they belong to transitions in y_petri. I found that it is useful to have a way to express also relations between Petri net nodes (places / transitions) than just arcs. For this purpose, I use Ted Nelson's ZZ structure (ZigZag) basically as a replacement for a relational database.

As for the simulation (Petri net execution), general hybrid Petri nets have no faster simulation method available than implicit Euler method (which I call pseudo Euler). This is because a Petri net can be used to implement a Turing machine, for which no general speedup is possible.

If you are willing to operate in Ruby, you can thus describe a Petri net in y_petri or y_nelson DSL code. I do not provide conversion to XML, as I do not consider it superior to the source DSL. It would be possible to write such export routine, but I encourage you to use the DSL instead.

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