To store Petri nets and make them available for other users and tools, the SEPIA frame- work comes with a serialization functionality. It supports the file formats PNML and Petrify. To launch the serialization process, an instance of a graphical Petri net, the declaration of the output file format, and the path to the target file are needed.

PNSerialization.serialize(gIFNet, PNSerializationFormat.PNML,
                          "/arbitrary/path/ifnet.pnml");

Parsing Petri Nets

Petri nets can also be parsed using SEPIA’s built-in parser. It supports the PNML and the Petrify file formats and recognizes the file type by the file extension. After parsing it returns an instance of AbstractGraphicalPN.

AbstractGraphicalPN gNet = PNParsing.parse(
                              new File("/arbitrary/path/ifnet.pnml"));

To determine the type of the parsed Petri net, the class type must be checked top-down.

if (gNet instanceof GraphicalIFNet)
    System.out.println("IF-Net");

else if (gNet instanceof GraphicalCPN)
    System.out.println("CPN");

else if (gNet instanceof GraphicalPTNet)
    System.out.println("P/T-Net");

else
    System.out.println("unknown net type");

If the input file type is already known an appropriate parser can be called manually. Thus a user can specify if a Petri net should be validated against its net type definition or if an exception should be thrown if the net type is not known.

PNMLParser p = new PNMLParser();
AbstractGraphicalPN gNet = p.parse(

                              new File("/arbitrary/path/ifnet.pnml"),
                              true,  // require net type
                              true   // validate
);