Abstract
The firing rule of Petri nets relies on a residuation operation for the commutative monoid of non negative integers. We identify a class of residuated commutative monoids, called Petri algebras, for which one can mimic the token game of Petri nets to define the behaviour of generalized Petri nets whose flow relations and place contents are valued in such algebraic structures. The sum and its associated residuation capture respectively how resources within places are produced and consumed through the firing of a transition. We show that Petri algebras coincide with the positive cones of lattice-ordered commutative groups and constitute the subvariety of the (duals of) residuated lattices generated by the commutative monoid of non negative integers. We however exhibit a Petri algebra whose corresponding class of nets is strictly more expressive than the class of Petri nets. More precisely, we introduce a class of nets, termed lexicographic Petri nets, that are associated with the positive cones of the lexicographic powers of the additive group of real numbers. This class of nets is universal in the sense that any net associated with some Petri algebra can be simulated by a lexicographic Petri net. All the classical decidable properties of Petri nets however (termination, covering, boundedness, structural boundedness, accessibility, deadlock, liveness ...) are undecidable on the class of lexicographic Petri nets. Finally we turn our attention to bounded nets associated with Petri algebras and show that their dynamics can be reformulated in term of MV-algebras.