Over the past two decades, research in the theory of Petri nets and the development of graphical tools has yielded a powerful methodology. The contributions in this book present both the theoretical development of Petri nets and industrial applications in areas such as discrete-event control design, scheduling, performance evaluation and deadlock avoidance. There are also comparative studies of Petri nets and other approaches. A primary theme of the book is to provide a unified approach to the applications of Petri nets in flexible and agile automation and, in that regard, a common notation and terminology is used. The book also allows readers to evaluate the benefits and applicability of state-of-the-art Petri-net methods and apply CAD tools to problems of interest.