Branching Processes of High-Level Petri Nets

In this paper, we define branching processes and unfoldings of high-level Petri nets and propose an algorithm which builds finite and complete prefixes of such unfoldings. The advantage of our method is that it avoids a potentially expensive translation of a high-level Petri net into a low-level one. The approach is conservative as all the verification tools employing the traditional unfoldings can be reused with prefixes derived directly from high-level nets. We show that this is often better than the usual explicit construction of the intermediate low-level net.