Affiliations: Université d'Orléans, LIFO, Orléans, France. jean-michel.couvreur@univ-orleans.fr | Université Pierre et Marie Curie, LIP6, Paris, France. denis.poitrenaud@lip6.fr | CNRS, LaBRI, UMR 5800, F-33400 Talence, France; Univ. Bordeaux, LaBRI, UMR 5800, F-33400 Talence, France. pascal.weil@labri.fr
Note: [] Address for correspondence: LIFO, Université d'Orléans, BP 6759, 45067 Orléans cedex 2, France
Abstract: We propose a new model of branching processes, suitable for describing the behavior of general Petri nets, without any finiteness or safeness assumption. In this framework, we define a new class of branching processes and unfoldings of a net N, which we call faithful. These coincide with the safe branching processes and unfoldings if N is safe, or weakly safe as in [Engelfriet 1991], but not in general. However, faithful branching processes and processes satisfy the good order-theoretic properties which make the safe processes of safe nets so useful in practice, and which are known not to hold for the safe processes of a general net. Faithful processes represent therefore good candidates to generalize the theory of safe nets to the general case.
Keywords: General Petri nets, Unfoldings, Branching processes
