Reversing P/T Nets

Petri Nets are a well-known model of concurrency and pro- vide 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 ex- plicitly expresses causality and conflict among events, e.g., an occurrence net, can be straightforwardly reversed by adding reversal for each of its transitions. Secondly, the standard unfolding construction associates a P/T net with 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.