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Appendix B. Annotated Bibliography

This annotated bibliography brings to a close our presentation on the theory of Petri nets. As can be expected, we have not been able to present all of the work which has been done on Petri nets. More complete information is available in the scientific literature.

Unfortunately much of the research on Petri nets is available only as technical reports from the institutions where the research has been done; only a fraction appears in journals with wide circulation. Even the Petri net literature which has appeared in journals is scattered: Thus, there may be some problems in finding these works.

There are three main sources for literature on Petri nets: journals, reports, and conferences. Theoretical journals in computer science are the most readily available source. These journals would include Theoretical Computer Science, Journal of Computer and System Sciences, Information and Control, and Journal of the ACM.

The papers published in these journals are often available first as technical reports. These reports are generally available only from the author(s) or the issuing agency, typically a department of a university. Many departments issue Ph.D. dissertations as technical reports; alternatively these are available from University Microfilms in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

A major source of Petri net research has been the work performed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.). Originally these reports were issued by Project MAC; Project MAC has since changed its name to the Laboratory for Computer Science. Another important source of research reports is the Institut fur Informationssystemforschung of the Gesellschaft fur Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung in Bonn, West Germany.

A final source of research results in Petri net theory is the proceedings of conferences. Work on Petri nets is very scattered among conferences with few predictable forums for presenting new results. The Annual Symposium on Switching and Automata Theory (now called the Symposium on the Foundations of Computer Science) has often had some presentations related to Petri nets. Petri net research is also reported at the Symposium on Mathematical Foundations of Computer Science, the Allerton Conference on Communication, Control and Computing, the Design Automation Conference, the ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, the Sagamore Computer Conference on Parallel Processing, the Conference on Information Sciences and Systems, the International Computing Symposium, and the IFIP Congress. The proceedings of these conferences are often available from ACM, IEEE, North-Holland Publishing Company, or Springer-Verlag.

This bibliography is mainly the result of my extensive research on Petri nets. An extensive search was made of journals and conference proceedings for papers on Petri nets. In addition, any reference listed by a new paper which was about Petri nets was also searched for until no new references were produced. I have read most of these references, but there are some which I have not been able to find (their existence is known only by being referenced in some paper which I have found) and others which I cannot read because they are not in English. I hope that this bibliography will be of use to you in any further research you may do on Petri nets.

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