Complex selecting criteria modeling with colored petri nets

Colored Petri Nets (CPNs) have been widely used as a mathematical modeling tool of dynamical systems, both for control and simulation. Many processes have been published in the CPN literature but none of them includes complex selecting criteria. In this paper, to broaden the use of CPNs in discrete-event simulation, we present two CPN modules that model complex selecting criteria. The first module selects a constant number of entities from a set of places. The second module selects a variable number of entities from a set of places. The modules were designed to be useful in many modeling situations. Selection of entities is from an unrestricted number of different places, the entities to be selected can be of different types and a set of additional entities might be required in the selection process. Selection processes may be repeated without reinitialization of the modules and the modules can be combined to model more complex selection processes. The paper includes an example of the use of the modules in a real-life simulation model.