Carl Petri’s 1962 doctoral thesis, “Kommunikation mit automaten” (Communicating with automata) [1], introduced a new type of formalism to the computing world. That formalism, now known as Petri nets, has been widely studied ever since. Petri nets are now used to study processes in engineering and management, control theory, and, of course, traditional computing automata.

One of the established groups that studies Petri nets is DFG Forschergruppe Petri Net Technology, whose work is supported by the German Research Council (DFG). This Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) volume largely consists of papers by members of this group, along with some contributions from others. The material presented consists of theoretical results regarding Petri nets, as well as applications of these nets to communications.

One of the important aspects of the work presented relates to a Petri net “baukasten” (building set, as for toys), which the authors suggest will be useful in selecting the right net for an application. The first few papers describe this baukasten, and its suggested uses. Two other papers describe a Petri Net Markup Language, based on Extensible Markup Language (XML), and present a survey of results on rule-based refinement of Petri nets. Several papers address the use of Petri nets in workflow modeling, and improving business processes.