Coloured Petri Nets as a formalism to represent alternative models for a discrete event system

Resumen

Coloured Petri nets (CPN) constitute a formalism that belongs to the paradigm of the Petri nets, used to model discrete event systems (DES). This formalism has been extensively used to represent complex systems and shows its full potential when arise a large number of subnets with the same static structure thanks to the folding process. In this paper a completely new application of the Coloured Petri nets is presented. It implies a conceptual variation in the traditional scope of use of the CPN. The coloured Petri nets will be used to represent sets of alternative Petri nets. In other words, they will represent a set of exclusive models for a single DES by means if a unique CPN. The main advantage in this application of the coloured Petri nets is that they can be used to develop efficient algorithms to solve optimization problems based on Petri net models.