On the Structure of Cycloids Introduced by Carl Adam Petri.

Cycloids are particular Petri nets for modelling processes of actions or events. They belong to the fundaments of Petri’s general systems theory and have very different interpretations, ranging from Einstein’s relativity theory to elementary information processing gates. Despite their simple definitions, their properties are still not completely understood. This contribution provides for the first time a formal definition together with new results concerning their structure. For instance, it is shown that the minimal length of a cycle is the length of a local basic circuit, possibly decreased by an integer multiple of the number of semi-active transitions.