It takes little time to see that this book’s subtitle more accurately reflects the scope and contents than the main title. The focus is indeed on a progressively evolving tutorial introduction to Petri nets and, later, colored Petri nets, put in the context of small simple enterprise information systems. The implementation exercises and other models can be implemented in the CPN Tools toolbox (not included with this book). The reader should not be surprised that there is no discussion or presentation of methodologies and techniques dwelling on management theories and business process management as seen in a business sense, as the approach taken is almost exclusively from a computer science perspective. On the other hand, the book is quite pedagogical in that each chapter has many small examples and exercises to test the reader’s progress (Appendix A provides the solutions).
Chapter 1 is an introduction to information systems, with their different types of use, and the role of models, including their life cycle. Chapter 2 concerns the relationship between business processes, information systems, and models. This chapter unfortunately fails to mention and put in perspective the different categories of methods, modeling approaches, standards, and their history; therefore, the reader with some experience might find it difficult to compare Petri nets with the many other model categories and assess advantages and disadvantages. There should at least have been an explicit comparison with unified modeling language (UML)-based modeling, transaction-based modeling, and simplistic workflow description techniques.
Chapter 3 provides a good basic introduction to Petri nets; regrettably, the examples are mostly engineering cases, such as an elevator. Chapter 4 discusses application concepts such as model ubiquity; the respective roles of places, transitions, and tokens; and basic constructs (concurrency, synchronization, mutual exclusion, and multiple arcs). The natural evolution from Petri nets to colored and time-dependent Petri nets is covered in chapter 5.
The formal aspects of colored Petri nets and hierarchical modeling are addressed in chapters 6 and 7, again with the examples pertaining to engineering cases (thermostat, logistics, and manufacturing). More cases linked to service-related functions in the enterprise and to information sharing should have been used to help readers better grasp opportunities and limitations before chapter 8. That chapter provides analysis techniques in existing Petri net models (reachability, structure) or extensions (simulation, process mining). Even in the concluding remarks in chapter 9, not much is said about the overriding difficulties in building, updating, characterizing, and validating Petri net-based models in a real enterprise environment faced with constant adaptation, re-specification of processes and stakeholders, interaction with other parties’ systems, reorganizations, and the special-interest battles of the people behind them.
Mostly because of its pedagogical approach, the book is valuable for computer science students wanting to learn about Petri net models. Researchers will miss the advanced techniques as well as the comparison with others (declarative functional programming, business protocols and their routing, planning by constrained logic programming, business genetics, and many more). Practitioners will miss information on many operational, risk, and cost issues, as well as outsourcing and smart business network challenges.
