Process Petri Nets with Time Stamps and Their Using in Project Management

Process Petri nets with time stamps (PPNTS) are the newly introduced class of low-level Petri nets, whose definition and the properties are the main topic of this chapter; they generalize the properties of Petri net processes in the area of design, modeling and verification of generally parallel systems with the discrete time. Property-preserving Petri net process algebras (PPPAs) were originally designed for the specification and verification of manufacturing systems. PPPA does not need to verify composition of Petri net processes because all their algebraic operators preserve the specified set of the properties. These original PPPAs are generalized for the class of the PPNTSs in this chapter. The new COMP, SYNC and JOIN algebraic operators are defined for the class of PPNTS and their chosen properties are proved. With the support of these operators, the PPNTSs can be extended also to the areas of project management and the determination of the project critical path with the support of the critical path method (CPM). The new CPNET subclass of PPNTS class is defined in this chapter. It is specially designed for the generalization of the CPM activity charts and their properties. This fact is then demonstrated on the simple project example and its critical path and other property specifications.