A Petri net-based architecture for plant simulation

We propose a hybrid architecture for the simulation of plants. Its core is a Petri net executor based on a new class of Petri nets called extended simple colored Petri nets. The executor is supervised by an expert system. Our architecture is very well-suited for the software-engineering development of plant simulators, as development times and errors can be dramatically reduced. The validity of our approach has been demonstrated by means of an implementation that we have realized as an industrial project for Demag Italimpianti.