Efficient Data Structures for a New Petri Net Based Simulator

This paper shows how the basic elements of a Petri Net are represented in a Petri Net simulator as data structures, and how they contribute to the efficiency of the simulator. After a brief introduction to Petri Nets, this work presents a new Petri Nets based approach known as Activity-Oriented Petri Nets (AOPN), and then the simulator GPen SIM as a realization of AOPN. The data structures of GPen SIM are presented through an application example that deals with the problem of finding total costs of production when machines and resources add costs to the production. Unlike the most other simulators that compute only time, the data structures presented in this work reveal that the simulator is capable of calculating costs too.