Petri nets with resources for modeling primary healthcare systems

Petri net is a powerful formalism for modeling, analysis and design of discrete event systems. With a good capacity of representing synchronization and concurrency they are used in different field of applications. This paper presents a modeling methodology of the primary healthcare system based on Petri nets. A disease of a patient is diagnosed and cured by following a sequence of treatments and cares belonging to a medical protocol. We show that for almost all of the diseases, each medical protocol can be modeled by a state machine Petri net. When the protocol is applied, different resources may be needed. Here we consider only resources that are conservative and they can be modeled by places where the number of tokens in the place says the number of available instances of that resource. By applying the available results of the Petri nets, many properties of the healthcare system can be studied. In particular, the prediction of different indices can be estimated by using the formal model.