# Are Petri Nets actually used in the industry

I'm having a hard time finding any prominent applications of Petri nets in the industry. Can you name some, or are Petri nets still just an academic curiosity?

• You may be asking the wrong people. – Raphael May 8 '17 at 20:46
• I believe most applications for business modeling still present almost everything as some sort of flow chart to the user. Hard to see what happens under the hood of these programs, since most of them are proprietary. Also, there's a whole landscape between an 'academic curiosity' and 'prominent applications in industry'. – Discrete lizard May 8 '17 at 21:02
• You may find it easier to find applications of Petri Nets instead of prominent applications of Petri Nets. Personally, I apply Petri Nets to the organization of my computer programs. The programs I create are JavaScript programs that use the Acrobat/JavaScript API for PDF form applications. – John Frederick Chionglo May 9 '17 at 8:01
• Petri nets can be used to model biochemical reactions: e.g. $A+B\to C$ is a transition that consumes a token from each place $A,B$ and produces a token in place $C$. Then, P-invariants and T-invariants can be used to infer properties about the biological system. They can be given a stochastic semantics, so that systems can be simulated using suitable Monte Carlo algorithms. So, they are relevant to systems biology. While I can't provide references to industrial uses, I'd be surprised if no pharma company didn't use them for some purpose. – chi May 9 '17 at 8:59