A condition for behaviour-preserving colour simplification in well-formed coloured nets

Abstract

Well-formed colored Petri nets (WNs) have been recently defined as a new formalism that allows the automatic identification of model symmetries by means of the construction of the symbolic reachability graph (SRG). The authors define a sufficient structural condition for the simplification of the color structure of the net that can exploit symmetries not detectable with the SRG. The condition is based on the projection of the color sets onto their basic components, and on the check for the state machine structure of these projections. When the condition is satisfied, the component of the color set can be erased from the model without changing its behavior. The simplified WNs can have reduced SRG or not, but in any case are easier to analyze by means of the SRG analysis technique. >