A colored petri net for the France-Paris metro

Abstract

This work tries to explain how colored Petri nets (CPNs) can be useful for modeling a real life complex networked transport system. Petri nets are expressive graphical formalisms that are useful for modeling discrete system behavior. Petri nets are well documented and have an extensive amount of well researched areas and interesting applications. Colored Petri nets (CPNs) are very useful extensions to traditional Petri nets, increasing their expressivity and modeling power. An underground metro system is a good case of complexity. The real French Paris Metro system that forms part of the RER is considered and analyzed with part of it being modeled as a colored Petri net or (CPN). The CPN used is as close as possible to the real life system and is fully executable. Different scenarios and results are obtainable from this apart from its usefulness for validation and verification. This paper thus assesses the suitability of colored Petri nets for modeling real world high complexity transport systems. The findings are briefly discussed.