Strong behavioral similarities in timed-arc Petri nets

The concept of process similarity has attracted the attention of many researchers in the recent literature, since it measures the degree of proximity of processes. Similarities are therefore useful for the efficient management of large repositories, since they allow us to find the appropriate process models among hundreds or thousands of possible candidates. However, time constraints are usually omitted when these similarity measures are defined, so in this paper two similarity measures are defined over a timed extension of Petri nets, the so-called timed-arc Petri nets, in which tokens are assigned an age indicating the time elapsed from creation, and PT-arcs (place to transition arcs) are labeled with time intervals that are used to restrict the age of the tokens that can be used to fire the adjacent transition.