Customer Reviews

Petri Nets for Systems Engineering

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This book goes for breadth, in a very ambitious take on Petri nets: to cover the complete range of activities of systems engineering supported by nets, from modelling to verification to validation and execution, including case studies in application domains. All this in a complete, self-contained volume. And it mostly succeeds in giving a general view of the possible uses of Petri nets and the research areas related to these nets. So it may be useful to both practicioners and researchers.

The chapters are divided into parts, according to the many aspects investigated: Part I is on basic concepts of Petri nets, including its features, models, definitions and properties. Part II takes on modelling systems with Petri nets. Individual techniques and complete methods (e.g. state-based modelling and event-based modelling) are presented, and case studies analysed. Then, Part III includes four chapters about verification of Petri net models, presenting an array of different techniques and approaches: state-space-based model checking, structural methods, deductive logic-based methods and techniques based on process algebras. Finally, Part IV is about validation and execution of nets, including code generation from net models, and Part V showcases three application domains for the nets: manufacturing systems, workflow systems and telecommunications.

To cover all this ground in the subject of Petri nets, the book was written collectively by more than 20 authors; even some of the chapters are divided into sections written by different people. This naturally results in noticeable variations of style and quality between chapters, and even between sections in the same chapter. Although some effort was spent to try to integrate them better, some sections (and chapters) are quite convoluted and hard to understand, while others are very clear and informative. The notation and style of presentation also changes, but this is mostly not a problem, because chapters often tackle different problems. Also, most of the sections that are difficult to grasp include references that can be used to learn more about the subject. Some sections are really very superficial, covering only the major ideas involved in some technique or method, and sweeping most of the meaty details under the rug, to the references. Unfortunately, some sections don't include enough references to track the original work from which they're based.

Finally, a warning regarding the title: it seems mostly directed to practicioners, but actually includes a lot of material that can be classified as recent research, and so not thoroughly in the field. This is very valuable to a researcher on Petri nets, who can get in contact with a lot of the research on nets done elsewhere, but may be not directly useful to practicioners. Even so, users of Petri nets that are not very interested in research results may take from the book a general idea of tools and possibilities that can be used with net models in all the stages of systems design and execution.

For all readers, I believe this book is mostly useful as a collection of pointers to further research or experimentation.