Towards a Notion of Distributed Time for Petri Nets

Abstract

We set the ground for research on a timed extension of Petri nets where time parameters are associated with tokens and arcs carry constraints that qualify the age of tokens required for enabling. The novelty is that, rather than a single global clock, we use a set of unrelated clocks --- possibly one per place --- allowing a local timing as well as distributed time synchronisation. We give a formal definition of the model and investigate properties of local versus global timing, including decidability issues and notions of processes of the respective models