An efficient method for unfolding colored Petri nets

Unfolding is an essential problem in reusing existing Petri net simulation and analysis techniques and related tools for colored Petri nets. We present an efficient unfolding method, in which we provide two approaches to efficiently compute transition instances. That is, for a transition, if the color set of each variable in its guard is a finite integer domain, a constraint satisfaction approach is used to obtain all valid transition instances; otherwise, a general algorithm is adopted, in which some optimization techniques like partial binding - partial test and pattern matching are used. This method has been applied to unfold large-scale colored Petri nets, which has proven its efficiency.