Petri net (PN) slicing is a

syntactic In linguistics, syntax ( ) is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure (constituency ...

technique used to reduce a PN model based on a given criterion. Informally, a slicing criterion could be a property for which a PN model is analyzed or is a set of places, transitions, or both. A sliced part constitutes only that part of a PN model that may affect the criteria.

Background

The term slicing was coined by M. Weiser in the context of program

debugging In engineering, debugging is the process of finding the Root cause analysis, root cause, workarounds, and possible fixes for bug (engineering), bugs. For software, debugging tactics can involve interactive debugging, control flow analysis, Logf ...

. According to Wieser, a program slice is a reduced,

executable program In computer science, executable code, an executable file, or an executable program, sometimes simply referred to as an executable or binary, causes a computer "to perform indicated tasks according to encoded instructions", as opposed to a da ...

that can be obtained from a program P based on the variables of interest and

line number In computing, a line number is a method used to specify a particular sequence of characters in a text file. The most common method of assigning numbers to lines is to assign every line a unique number, starting at 1 for the first line, and increm ...

by removing statements such that program slicing replicates part of the behavior of the program. The term was later adapted to the context of Petri nets and for other classes of Petri nets such as Algebraic Petri nets. Exampleslice

References

{{compu-prog-stub Petri nets