Petri nets basics
A Petri net consists of places, transitions, and directed arcs. Arcs run between places and transitions, never between places or between transitions. The places from which an arc runs to a transition are called the input places of the transition; the places to which arcs run from a transition are called the output places of the transition. Places may contain any non-negative number of tokens . A distribution of tokens over the places of a net is called a marking . A transition of a Petri net may fire whenever there is a token at the end of all input arcs; when it fires, it consumes these tokens, and places tokens at the end of all output arcs. A firing is atomic, i.e., a single non-interruptible step. Execution of Petri nets is nondeterministic : when multiple transitions are enabled at the same time, any one of them may fire. If a transition is enabled, it may fire, but it doesn't have to. Since firing is nondeterministic, and multiple tokens may be present anywhere in the net (even in the same place), Petri nets are well suited for modeling the concurrent behavior of distributed systems .
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petri_nets
