In: ACM-SE 45: Proceedings of the 45th annual southeast regional conference, pages 514-514. ACM Press, 2007.
Abstract: Petri Nets are a graphical modeling language suitable for modeling distributed, concurrent, deterministic and nondeterministic systems with synchronous and asynchronous communications. One attraction of Petri Nets is that the basic vocabulary is small which renders them very flexible in terms of application domains for modeling. However, lack of high-level constructs and related support makes modeling of large system with Petri nets impractical. This is where Colored Petri Nets come into play.
Colored Petri Nets (CP-Nets or CPNs) extend the vocabulary of ordinary Petri Nets and add features that make them suitable for modeling large systems. CPNs combine the strengths of ordinary Petri Nets with the strengths of a high-level programming language. Petri Nets provide the primitives for process interaction, while the programming language provides the primitives for the definition of data types and the manipulations of data values.
From a practical applications point of view, CPNs support a mechanism of modules that allows one to construct models of large systems in a hierarchical manner. The hierarchy and module concept of CPNs allow different levels of abstraction that are inherent in most systems. The graphical representation makes it easy to see the basic structure of a complex CPN model, i.e., understand how the individual subsystems interact with each other. A major benefit gained by using CPNs is to obtain complete and unambiguous specification in the design stage of a project, and verify if it indeed provides the defined services correctly. ...