# Reversing Place Transition Nets

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.04266 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.04266/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 9 Oct 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Formal Translation from Reversing Petri Nets to Coloured Petri Nets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.00629/) (2023)
- [A Reversible Perspective on Petri Nets and Event Structures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.16714/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Petri nets are a well-known model of concurrency and provide an ideal setting for the study of fundamental aspects in concurrent systems. Despite their simplicity, they still lack a satisfactory causally reversible semantics. We develop such semantics for Place/Transitions Petri nets (P/T nets) based on two observations. Firstly, a net that explicitly expresses causality and conflict among events, for example an occurrence net, can be straightforwardly reversed by adding a reverse transition for each of its forward transitions. Secondly, given a P/T net the standard unfolding construction associates with it an occurrence net that preserves all of its computation. Consequently, the reversible semantics of a P/T net can be obtained as the reversible semantics of its unfolding. We show that such reversible behaviour can be expressed as a finite net whose tokens are coloured by causal histories. Colours in our encoding resemble the causal memories that are typical in reversible process calculi.