The 40th annual international Petri Nets conference will be organized by the Process and Data Science (PADS) group at RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany. The new PADS group was established in the context of Wil van der Aalst’s Alexander von Humboldt Professorship. The conference will take place in the conference area of the Tivoli football stadium close to the city center of Aachen. The language of the conference is English, and its proceedings will be published by Springer-Verlag in Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Papers presenting original research on application or theory of Petri nets, as well as contributions addressing topics relevant to the general field of distributed and concurrent systems are sought. All accepted regular papers will be considered for an “Outstanding Paper” award. Some of the best papers will be invited, in an extended form, as submissions to a special issue of a well-established computer science journal.

General Topics Related to Concurrency

    Model checking and verification of distributed systems
    Verification of infinite-state or parametric systems
    Causality/partial order theory of concurrency
    Educational issues related to concurrency
    New developments in the theory of concurrency
    Modelling of hardware and biological systems

Topics Specific to Petri Nets

    Analysis and synthesis, structure and behavior of nets
    System design and model-driven development using nets
    Relationships between Petri nets and other approaches
    Net-based semantical, logical and algebraic calculi
    Higher-level net models (colored nets, timed nets, etc.)
    Stochastic net models
    Verification and model checking using nets
    Process discovery and conformance checking
    Computer tools for nets
    Standardization of nets
    Experience reports describing applications of nets to different kinds of systems and application fields, e.g.:

flexible manufacturing systems 	office automation
real-time systems 	workflows
embedded systems 	process mining
biological systems 	supervisory control
health and medical systems 	protocols and networks
environmental systems 	Internet and web services
hardware 	e-commerce and trading
telecommunications 	programming languages
railway networks 	performance evaluation
component-based development 	operations research

Paper Submission

Two kinds of papers can be submitted:

    Regular papers (max 20 pages) describing original results pertaining to the development of the theory of Petri Nets and distributed and concurrent systems in general, new results extending the applicability of Petri Nets, or case studies, application and experience reports pertinent to the practical use of Petri Nets and concurrency.
    Tool papers (max 10 pages) describing a computer tool based on Petri Nets (not an application of the tool or the theory behind the tool). The tool should be available for use by other groups (but not necessarily for free). The submission should indicate how the reviewers can get access to the tool (this must be for free). The tool will be demonstrated in the Tool Exhibition, in addition to being presented in a conference talk.

Submitted Papers Must

    be contributions that have not been published elsewhere or submitted to other conferences/journals in parallel with this conference.
    clearly state the problem being addressed, the goal of the work, the results achieved, and the relation to other work.
    be in English and in the Springer LNCS format
    adhere to the page limit for the relevant category (see above).
    be submitted electronically (as a PDF file) by the deadline indicated at the top of this Call for Papers using EasyChair

The Title Page Must

    contain a short abstract and a classification of the topics covered, preferably using the list of topics above.
    indicate whether the paper is submitted as a regular paper or tool paper.

Submissions violating the above requirements may be immediately rejected by the PC Chairs.

Tool Exhibition

An exhibition of Petri Net tools will take place on Wednesday. It consists of informal demonstrations for small groups/individuals, and there are no scheduled talks. Requests for participation in the tool exhibition must be sent to the Tool Exhibition Chair by the deadline stated at the top of this Call for Papers. They should include a link to the web pages for the tool (or a short description of the tool). The demonstrators should bring their own laptops, while the organizers may be requested to give access to the Internet.

Courses, Workshops and Tutorials

The main conference takes place from Wednesday to Friday. The three days before the main conference also offer a wide range of activities. The Petri Net Course takes place from Sunday to Tuesday. It offers a thorough introduction to Petri Nets in four half-day modules on Sunday and Monday, and a full-day tutorial module on Tuesday. For successful participation in the entire course, including preparation and examination, three credit points (ECTS) will be awarded. Each module of the course can also be taken separately, without any credit.

Workshops take place on Monday and Tuesday. On Tuesday there will be two tutorials on applications of Petri Nets and/or new developments presented by experts in the area. These tutorials can be followed independently or in combination with the Petri Net Course. Detailed descriptions of Workshops and Tutorials will be made available via the conference web pages.

It is also possible to arrange Meetings and Courses related to Petri Nets. Submissions for such activities must contain a 2–5 page description. They must be received by the PC chairs via email no later than January 10, 2019.