This book attempts to provide a bridge between science and engineering in the field of concurrent control systems specified by Petri nets. According to the preface, it would be “useful to CAD researchers, engineers, and designers of concurrent systems.” I tend to agree with this assessment as an educational tool. I also agree that electrical engineers would benefit from the book, especially if they visit the online exposition at http://www.hippo.iee.uz.zgora.pl.

Ten coherently integrated chapters make up this book. Each chapter ends with a good set of relevant references. After the introductory chapter, related work is presented in chapter 2. Chapter 3, “Perfect Graphs and Comparability Graphs,” provides the background of the graph terminology used in the book. Chapter 4, “Hypergraphs and Exact Transversals,” completes the review of graphs in less than ten pages. Chapter 5 is on “Analysis of Concurrent Control Systems,” covering topics of state equations, concurrent and sequential analysis, and their hypergraph representations. Chapter 6 is on “Decomposition of Concurrent Control Systems” and covers state machine (SM) decomposition based on place invariants, graph theory, and hypergraph theory, while providing an ample set of examples in each category. Chapter 7, “Prototyping of Concurrent Control Systems,” covers the prototyping flow of concurrent control, specification by interpreted Petri nets, system decomposition, modeling of the decomposed modules, and system verification. The second half of chapter 7 is dedicated to the prototyping of integrated concurrent control systems from specification to implementation. Chapter 8 is about “Modelling of Concurrent Systems in Hardware Languages,” covering modeling of concurrent systems as a composition and description of a finite state machine (FSM) in Verilog, while providing the basic terminology and ample examples. The last chapter is on “Implementation of Concurrent Control Systems in FPGA.” This final chapter essentially puts all the pieces together with sections covering an introduction to the programmable devices, field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), and implementation of concurrent controllers in FPGA. In addition, partial reconfiguration of concurrent controllers and systems is covered with static and dynamic approaches.

The book has high-quality examples covering diverse applications, such as a milling machine and a traffic-light controller, by connecting theory with engineering using interpreted Petri nets. It is stated on the back cover that because of the “ubiquity of concurrent control systems in a huge variety of technological areas including transportation, medicine, artificial intelligence, manufacturing, security and safety, and planetary exploration, the ... design methods described here will be of ... interest to control engineers and systems and circuits researchers in many areas of industry and academia.” Although I agree in principle with this assessment, given the fast pace of industrial development, the interest in almost any theoretical framework is ignored. Therefore, I do not see a big industrial impact with this book. Besides, industries, such as Xilinx, continuously provide development tools of their own to capture developers’ interest.