How does rule-based verification with Petri nets work and what is this good for?

Question

A friend just pointed me out to an new development in computer science called "rule based verification with Petri nets". He's not a computer guy but an artist, so I wonder if that's really something cool I must look at? Over the phone he told me from reading and translating an newspaper in Russian, that this fancy new technology is all about automatically getting code architectures of rule based systems perfectly right. A kind of artifical intelligence helping us to code perfectly? Ok, I really don't know, haven't studied computer science.

I'm curious: What exactly is this all about? And how does it work? Can I use it for my framework?

I guess a "rule based system" is almost everything: All our code has rules. Hope for some useful answers.

Answer 1

Petri nets are just a fancy way to express a state space and the transitions between the states. They are Turing-complete, though, so everything that applies to Turing machines is true for Petri nets, too.

They are in no way an artificial intelligence. In my oppinion, the must useful application for petri nets is as an abstract modelling tool for simulation purposes.

Edit: Some examples for this might be the simulation of packets in a computer network or how automats will behave. If you are still interested, here is a link to Computer Simulation class that teaches Petri Nets with some random behaviour: http://www.sim-md.de/its/Lectures/09-PetriNets.pdf