A Petri net simulation kernel with extendibility, convenient modeling and fast simulation engine

This paper presents a Petri net simulation kernel. Three important essentials in Petri net simulation are discussed, namely, extendibility, convenient modeling support and fast simulation engine. Firstly, object oriented mechanism is used to provide extendibility, so our kernel can be applied to simulate various Petri net models. Secondly, convenient modeling support includes a graphic user interface to simplify the Petri net modeling process and a hierarchal architecture to benefit the modeling of large-scale Petri nets. Thirdly, parallel simulation support is provided to accelerate simulation process which is always a time-consuming task, especially when dealing with a large-scale Petri net. Furthermore, a semi-automatic net partition mechanism is supported to divide the whole Petri net model into some sub-nets which are assigned to different processors to simulate in parallel.