PREDICATE TRANSITION NETS

Predicate/Transition (Pr/T) Nets, also called High-Level Petri Nets in general, have been first
introduced by H. J. Genrich and K. Lautenbach (in [gl81]) and were the first class of high-level
Petri Nets.

Definition
(according to [gl81])

A Pr/T Net consists of the following constituents:

1. a directed net (S, T; F) where

2. a structure ½ consisting of some sorts of individuals together with some operations and
relations
3. a labelling of arcs assigning to all elements of F a formal sum of n-tuples of variables
where n is the arity of the predicate connected to the arc
4. an inscription on transitions assigning to some elements of T a logical formula built
from ½ where variables occurring free in a transition have to occur at an adjacent arc
5. a marking M of predicates S with formal sums of n-tuples of individuals (items)
6. a function K which assigns to the predicates an upper bound for the number of copies of
the same item which it may carry
7. the transition rule which expresses the common interpretation of Prt/T nets:
A transition may occur, for an assignment of individuals to the variables which satisfies
the formula inscribed to the transition, if all input predicates carry enough copies of
proper items and for no output predicate the capacity K is exceded by adding the
respective copies of items.
The set of all markings connected to M through such occurrences of transitions is denoted
by [M>].

Sample Net
(from [gl81])
Tools
PROD is a reachability analysis tool.
POSES is a simulation and development system, which uses an extended Pr/T Net model.
COMBAG is a tool for the computation of invariants.
INCOME is a set of user-oriented tools for modelling, simulation and implementing business
processes.
PSITool is an analysis tool for stochastic high-level Petri Nets.

AUGMENTED TRANSITION NETS

Context free and transition net grammars cannot capture all syntactic constraint more
generalisation is needed. One way of doing this is to augment context free grammars with
transformations. Transformations can specify word rearrangement for example

when did the clever robot move the red engine to the appropriate chassis
Studying grammars that involve transformations takes us into an area mainly studied by
linguists.

Alternatively we can discuss augmented transition nets or ATN's where linguistic properties
called features are attached to the current parse-tree node. Suppose we were traversing a noun
phrase ATN and we encountered a or this it would be reasonable to attach a singular feature to
the noun phrase. Later when a noun phrase noun is met the noun's features held in a features
dictionary can be consulted to check that they are consistent with the features already come
across. To capture all the syntactic constraints of English is a huge task and although many
grammars have been written and are being written there is no completely satisfying grammar yet
available.