Complex accident scenarios modelled and analysed by Stochastic Petri Nets

Abstract This paper is focused on the usage of Petri nets for an effective modelling and simulation of complicated accident scenarios, where an order of events can vary and some events may occur anywhere in an event chain. These cases are hardly manageable by traditional methods as event trees – e.g. one pivotal event must be often inserted several times into one branch of the tree. Our approach is based on Stochastic Petri Nets with Predicates and Assertions and on an idea, which comes from the area of Programmable Logic Controllers: an accidental scenario is described as a net of interconnected blocks, which represent parts of the scenario. So the scenario is firstly divided into parts, which are then modelled by Petri nets. Every block can be easily interconnected with other blocks by input/output variables to create complex ones. In the presented approach, every event or a part of a scenario is modelled only once, independently on a number of its occurrences in the scenario. The final model is much more transparent then the corresponding event tree. The method is shown in two case studies, where the advanced one contains a dynamic behavior.