ε-TPN:definition of a Time Petri Net formalism simulating the behaviour of the timed grafcets

Abstract

To allow a formal verification of timed GRAFCET models, many authors proposed to translate them into formal and well-reputed languages such as timed automata or Time Petri nets (TPN). Thus, the work presented in [Sogbohossou, Vianou, Formal modeling of grafcets with Time Petri nets, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, 23(5)(2015)] concerns the TPN formalism: the resulting TPN of the translation, called here ε-TPN, integrates some infinitesimal delays (ε) to simulate the synchronous semantics of the grafcet. The first goal of this paper is to specify a formal operational semantics for an ε-TPN to amend the previous one: especially, priority is introduced here between two defined categories of the ε-TPN transitions, in order to respect strictly the synchronous hypothesis. The second goal is to provide how to build the finite state space abstraction resulting from the new definitions.