Abstract. Petri Nets formalism requires standardisation to facilitate the work of researchers in this field and to enable the data exchange between different Petri Nets tools through a common format. Following this, a three-part International Standard (ISO/IEC 15909) has been developed. Part 1 is devoted to terms and definitions for Place/Transition Nets and High-Level Petri Nets. It is now completed (published as a standard) but will include an addendum on Symmetric Nets. Part 2 aims at providing a transfer format for High-level Petri Nets, called PNML, based on XML. Work on part 3 which deals with extensions has not started yet. In this paper the first two parts of the standard are presented. Then, to support part 2, an implementation of PNML, through an API framework to be integrated into Petri Net tools, is proposed. It allows for the translation of any Petri Net, designed by a given tool in a dedicated format, into PNML.
The Challenge of PN StandardisationPetri Nets [4,8,26,28] are a mathematically defined formalism and may thus be used to provide unambiguous specifications and descriptions of applications. They are especially dedicated to specify and design discrete event systems and this technique is particularly suited to parallel and distributed systems development as it supports concurrency. The technique allows for specification of systems at a level which is independent of the implementation choices (i.e., by software, hardware -electronic and/or mechanical -or humans, or a combination of these) and has been widely used to describe telecommunication systems, protocols, microprocessor architectures,... since their invention in 1962. They also constitute an executable technique, allowing specification prototypes to be developed to test ideas at the earliest and cheapest opportunity. Specifications written in the technique may be subject to analysis methods to prove properties about the specifications, before implementation commences, thus saving on A problem with Petri nets is the explosion of the huge number of elements when described in their graphical form, for specification of complex systems. were developed to overcome this problem by introducing higher-level concepts, such as the use of complex structured data carried by tokens, and using algebraic expressions to annotate net elements. The use of high-level concepts within this Petri net framework is analogous to the use of those in high-level programming languages (as opposed to assembly languages). In the Petri nets community the term High-level net is generally used to refer to nets using such concepts.Two Standardisation of the technique has been seen as an opportunity to obtain a better organisation of the work in the Petri Net community. It has several issues:-to enable the stakeholder -researchers, as well as engineers using Petri nets -to use the same terminology; -to develop future extensions on a stable common basis, e.g., P/T nets or High-level nets; -to provide a reference implementation that will facilitate the data exchange between...