Wolfgang Reisig – författare

This book fills a serious gap by providing a conceptual framework for understanding the digital world. This world contains large, heterogeneous systems that have to manage dynamic behavior as well as static items and data. Obviously, new, digital methods are needed to deal with the challenges of the digital world.

This book introduces such a method with Heraklit, an intuitively simple, albeit powerful framework for modeling, communicating, and analyzing computer-integrated systems. It integrates proven methods for composing modules, describing behavior with local cause and effect, and digitally representing real- and imagined-world items, resulting in a comprehensive, expressive, concerted, technically simple, digital modeling method.

This book is structured according to three Heraklit pillars, starting in Part I with the central Heraklit concept of modules, in particular their composition and refinement. Part II covers the second pillar of Heraklit, dynamics, focusing on modules that describe aspects of behavior. Part III focuses on static aspects. In particular, real- and imagined-world items and their symbolic representation are carefully distinguished and related. Together, these three pillars are consolidated in Part IV, integrating all concepts into a powerful formal framework. The book concludes in Part V with a more comprehensive case study of a typical retail business, recommendations on how to start modeling with Heraklit, and useful graphical conventions for the graphical representation of Heraklit models.

Heraklit covers the range from the first informal structuring ideas for a computer-integrated system, through the specification of (business) processes, the contributions of people, organizations, and mechanical devices, up to the construction of software. The book is therefore written for students in areas related to system modeling, system design, and system engineering, as well as for professionals in these fields.

This book offers an overview of the key ideas of Petri nets, how they were developed, and how they were applied in diverse applications.

The chapters in the first part offer individual perspectives on the impact of Petri’s work. The second part of the book contains personal memories from researchers who collaborated with him closely, in particular they recount his unique personality. The chapters in the third part offer more conventional treatments on various aspects of current Petri net research, and the fourth part examines the wide applications of Petri nets, and the relationships with other domains.

The editors and authors are the leading researchers in this domain, and this book will be a valuable insight for researchers in computer science, particularly those engaged with concurrency and distributed systems.

Die Informatik ist eine junge Wissenschaft, die sich durch einen rasanten technischen Fortschritt auszeichnet. Dadurch wird häufig übersehen, dass aktuelle Themen eine teilweise lange Entwicklungsgeschichte durchlaufen haben.

Informatikprofessoren der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin haben zu einigen ihrer aktuellen Arbeitsgebiete die Entwicklungslinien von den Anfängen bis Gegenwart mit einem Ausblick auf die mögliche Zukunft aufgezeichnet.

Dieser spannende und lehrreiche Einblick in die Informatik öffnet die Tür zu einem umfassenden und nicht nur technologisch geprägten Verständnis.

With their intuitive graphical approach and expressive analysis techniques, Petri nets are suitable for a wide range of applications and teaching scenarios, and they have gained wide acceptance as a modeling technique in areas such as software design and control engineering. The core theoretical principles have been studied for many decades and there is now a comprehensive research literature that complements the extensive implementation experience.

In this book the author presents a clear, thorough introduction to the essentials of Petri nets. He explains the core modeling techniques and analysis methods and he illustrates their usefulness with examples and case studies. Part I describes how to use Petri nets for modeling; all concepts are explained with the help of examples, starting with a generic, powerful model which is also intuitive and realistic. Part II covers the essential analysis methods that are specific to Petri nets, introducing techniques used to formulate keyproperties of system nets and algorithms for proving their validity. Part III presents case studies, each introducing new concepts, properties and analysis techniques required for very different modeling tasks. The author offers different paths among the chapters and sections: the elementary strand for readers who wish to study only elementary nets; the modeling strand for those who wish to study the modeling but not the analysis of systems; and finally the elementary models of the modeling strand for those interested in technically simple, but challenging examples and case studies.

The author achieves an excellent balance between consistency, comprehensibility and correctness in a book of distinctive design. Among its characteristics, formal arguments are reduced to a minimum in the main text with many of the theoretical formalisms moved to an appendix, the explanations are supported throughout with fully integrated graphical illustrations, and each chapter ends with exercises and recommendations for further reading.

The book is suitable for students of computer science and related subjects such as engineering, and for a broad range of researchers and practitioners.