Representation and Analysis of a Dynamical System with Petri Nets

Petri nets are gaining increased popularity among the scientific community during the last few years. They provide a simple and very intuitive graphical model for concurrency, parallelism and synchronization, and have a solid mathematical foundation as well as many analysis methods available. Because of these reasons, they have become a classical modeling tool for discrete event systems. In this paper we apply the Petri nets paradigm to represent and analyze a discrete dynamical system: a pressure tank. In particular, we are interested to determine the possible scenarios of a failure of the system and some associated behaviors. All computations have been done using a Mathematica package, which is also briefly described in this paper.