Petri Net Technology for Communication-Based Systems

This volume, ¿Petri Net Technology for Communication-Based Systems,¿ is a state-of-the-artreportin the seriesAdvances in Petri Nets. It showshowvarious well-established and new Petri net notions and techniques can be used for m- elingcommunication-basedsystems,withspecialfocusonwork?owmanagement and business processes. In the last 6 years this topic has been studied by the DFG Forschergruppe Petri Net Technology in Berlin in close cooperation with the international c- munity. The main results of this cooperation were presented at the 1st and 2nd InternationalColloquiaonPetriNetTechnologiesforModelingCommunication- Based Systems, held in Berlin in 1999 and 2001,respectively. A careful selection of contributions by members of the DFG Forschergruppe and by international experts in this ?eld are presented in this volume. Taking into account the fru- ful discussions during the two colloquia and the cross-refereeing process for the accepted papers, a high degree of common understanding was achieved, leading to a highly comprehensive presentation in this volume. The topics of the papers in this volume can be roughly classi?ed into the following two areas: ¿ Petri net technology and ¿ application to communication-based systems. Since most papers comprise aspects of both areas, we chose an alphabetic order. However, in the following we give a rough overview of the contributions in both areas according to the main focus of the corresponding papers.