Schematex
petri·van der Aalst 1998 workflow nets (a Murata place/transition net)·business·complexity 2/3·since v0.6.0

Order-fulfilment workflow net (WF-net)

A van der Aalst workflow net — a single source place and single sink place bracket an AND-split/join that runs picking and invoicing concurrently before shipping. The engine detects the WF-net structure and reports it in the SVG description.

For the process analyst

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Petri net — Order workflow 6 places, 4 transitions, 10 arcs. Marking {in:1}. Enabled: split. Class: workflow net. Order workflow in received pick invoice packed billed out shipped split pack bill ship
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A workflow net is the Petri-net dialect business-process people actually use: exactly one source place (no incoming arcs — where a case enters) and one sink place (no outgoing arcs — where it leaves). Schematex detects this structure and notes it in the diagram's <desc>.

Concurrency by construction. split forks the order into a pick branch and an invoice branch — warehouse and finance work in parallel. ship is the AND-join: it needs both packed and billed, so an order can't ship before it's been both packed and billed. No status flags, no polling — the net enforces the ordering.

Why not a flowchart? A flowchart would draw the same boxes but couldn't express "these two run concurrently and rejoin" without ambiguity. The Petri net's token flow makes the AND-split/join unambiguous and analysable. This is the same reduction BPMN uses internally.

Petri net syntax