Papers โ€บ Open Petri Nets

Open Petri Nets

16 Aug 2018arXiv:1808.05415links table onlyarchive 2025-07-28

John C. Baez, Jade Master

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The reachability semantics for Petri nets can be studied using open Petri nets. For us an "open" Petri net is one with certain places designated as inputs and outputs via a cospan of sets. We can compose open Petri nets by gluing the outputs of one to the inputs of another. Open Petri nets can be treated as morphisms of a category ๐–ฎ๐—‰๐–พ๐—‡(๐–ฏ๐–พ๐—๐—‹๐—‚), which becomes symmetric monoidal under disjoint union. However, since the composite of open Petri nets is defined only up to isomorphism, it is better to treat them as morphisms of a symmetric monoidal double category ๐•†๐ฉ๐ž๐ง(๐–ฏ๐–พ๐—๐—‹๐—‚). We describe two forms of semantics for open Petri nets using symmetric monoidal double functors out of ๐•†๐ฉ๐ž๐ง(๐–ฏ๐–พ๐—๐—‹๐—‚). The first, an operational semantics, gives for each open Petri net a category whose morphisms are the processes that this net can carry out. This is done in a compositional way, so that these categories can be computed on smaller subnets and then glued together. The second, a reachability semantics, simply says which markings of the outputs can be reached from a given marking of the inputs.

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