Branching Processes of General Petri Nets

Abstract

We propose a new model of branching processes, suitable for describing the behavior of general Petri nets, without any finiteness or safeness assumption. In this framework, we define a new class of branching processes and unfoldings of a net N, which we call faithful. These coincide with the safe branching processes and unfoldings if N is safe, or weakly safe as in [Engelfriet 1991], but not in general. However, faithful branching processes and processes satisfy the good order-theoretic properties which make the safe processes of safe nets so useful in practice, and which are known not to hold for the safe processes of a general net. Faithful processes represent therefore good candidates to generalize the theory of safe nets to the general case.