As a tribute to the Open Source software initiative I will shortly be releasing my Petri net Modeller software to the community for free. It is the only Petri net editor in existence built upon the Microsoft .net Framework and has been written in VB.net. The tool will be available to the community to alter, modify and enhance.

Petri nets are a graphical and mathematical tool for the modelling, analysis, simulation and control of systems that exhibit parallel evolution, concurrency, synchronisation and sharing phenomena. 

In 1962, as part of his Ph.D. dissertation, Carl Adam Petri introduced the concept of Petri nets (Place Transition nets) as a tool for the modelling of systems: “Petri formulated the basis for a theory of communication between asynchronous components of a computer system.” [Peterson, 1981:3] This general purpose mathematical tool was primarily used for the mathematical modelling of relations between conditions and events, but Petri’s dissertation was mainly a theoretic development of the basic concepts from which current Petri nets have been developed.

Since the 1960s, Petri net research has been conducted, including the start of Petri net related work by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 1970s. Much of this was conducted by Professor Jack B. Dennis, who published a considerable number of reports and papers as director of the Computation Structures Group (CSP).

However, further and more detailed work has enthusiastically continued in Europe, with The International Conference on Petri nets held every year since 1980 (formerly the European Workshop). “The chief attraction of this area is the way in which the basic aspects of distributed systems are identified, both conceptually and mathematically.” [Rozenberg, 2000:5].