A Categorical Semantics for Guarded Petri Nets

Permalink: https://statebox.org/research/publications/guarded-nets/
ArXiv.org: arxiv:2002.02762

A Categorical Semantics for Guarded Petri Nets

This paper is a collaboration with David Spivak during the 3rd Statebox Summit. It builds on the correspondence between Petri nets and free symmetric strict monoidal categories already investigated in the literature, and present a categorical semantics for Petri nets with guards. This comes in two flavors: deterministic and with side-effects. Using the Grothendieck construction, we show how the guard semantics can be internalized in the net itself.