Why I like Petri Nets with color and time as a modeling medium

Life as an industrial engineer involves thinking in terms of an action followed by assessment and decision, followed by an action which is followed by assessment and decision, and so on. Since more than one of these situations will be in progress at any given time, we have concurrency as our regular existence. Systems viewed in this way, become a cascading bipartite graph made of transitions and places. The behavior of the system is represented by the flow of tokens (the items moving through the process) taking place through in time. Assembling this puzzle into a clear picture is greatly assisted by the use of Petri Nets.

Stated another way, Petri Nets are a natural representation of dynamic systems seen by I.E.'s. For repeated situations with emergent behavior in which effectiveness is important, the Petri Net with color and time is a valuable tool. They are relatively simple yet rich in representation power.

This is the bottom line - Systems in which both structure and emergent behavior are important are naturally represented and analyzed via Petri Nets with color and time.

A nice website to get acquainted with Petri nets is Petri Nets