A transition is said to be enabled in a marking if each input place contains at least as many tokens as the
multiplicity of the input arc and if each inhibitor place contains fewer tokens than the multiplicity of the
inhibitor arc. Enabled transitions can fire, an atomic action which removes one token from all of its input
places, and generates one token in each of its output places. Figure 1 shows the state of a Petri net before
and after the firing of a transition. When arc weights larger that one are used, the number of tokens required
in each input place for the transition enabling and the number of tokens generated in each output place by
the transitions firing are determined by the weight of the arc connecting the place and the transition.
As an example, Figure 2 illustrates a PN that models two processes accessing a shared resource. The
processes can be in one of three possible states: active (doing something that does not involve the shared
resource), requesting the shared resource and accessing the shared resource. The shared resource can be idle
or busy. The initial marking shows that in the initial state both processes are active and the shared resource
is idle.
Figure 2: Producer-consumer GSPN model
Starting with the initial marking, transition occurrences (firings) yield new markings, that in turn give rise
to further transition occurrences. Sequences of transition occurrences (also called occurrence sequences) are
used to define qualitative (or behavioral) properties of PNs, such as deadlock freedom (no total deadlock
is reachable), liveness (no partial deadlock is reachable), boundedness (on each place the number of tokens
cannot grow in an unlimited way), and the existence of home states (markings that can always be reached
from any reachable state). Occurrence sequences are normally represented as a marking graph, which is an
arc-labelled directed graph with a distinguished initial vertex and edges labelled by transitions: the vertices
are the reachable markings, the distinguished initial vertex is the initial marking, labelled edges are all triples
(m, t, m
0
) such that m and m
0
are reachable markings satisfying m
t
−→ m
0
.
2.1 Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets
We are interested in the so-called Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets (GSPN) which are characterized by 2
types of transitions:
• Stochastic transitions: associated with an exponentially distributed firing delay.
• Immediate transitions: associated with a null firing delay.
Formally, a GSPN can be defined as follows:
3