Typed Petri Nets with Variable Arc Weights

Object-centric processes have become increasingly popular in the last years mainly due to the establishment of object-centric process mining. One of the most popular formalisms for describing lifecycles of objects and capturing relationships between them are object-centric Petri nets. An important feature of such nets is the ability to transfer an arbitrary number of same-typed objects upon transition firing by means of so-called variable arcs. In this work, we generalise the concept of variable arcs by introducing a fairly simple and versatile mechanism of arc weight parameterization via linear combinations of type-dependent weight variables, and incorporating it into the new formalism of typed Petri nets with variable arc weights. Moreover, we demonstrate that such extended variable arcs can be effectively eliminated, making the resulting net model expressively equivalent to a classical P/T-net. This result allows a natural transfer of analytical techniques available for P/T-nets to the formalisms like object-centric Petri nets.