This is a tutorial-review paper on Petri nets - a graphical and mathematical modeling tool. Petri nets are a promising tool for describing and studying information processing systems that are characterized as being concurrent, asynchronous, distributed, parallel, nondeterministic, and/or stochastic. The paper starts with a brief review of the history and the application areas considered in the literature. It then proceeds with introductory modeling examples, behavioral and structural properties, three methods of analysis, subclasses of Petri nets and their analysis.
