An introduction and review of petri net unfolding technology

Due to its intuitive graphical representation and variety of mathematical analysis methods, Petri nets are widely used in modeling and analysis of distributed and concurrent systems. However, state explosion problem has been hampering the practical application of Petri nets. Because the state explosion problem mainly results from arbitrary interleaving of highly concurrent activities, net unfolding technology and its complete finite prefixes have been proposed to overcome the problem. Now, with the vigorous development, net unfolding technology is widely applied to many areas including soundness verification of workflow nets, verification of multi-agent system, etc. This paper presents an overview of the latest advances in Petri net unfolding technology and its application. In addition, some promising research directions in unfolding of unbounded Petri nets are proposed.