Petri Nets for Smart Grids: The Story So Far
Mouzhi Ge, Bruno Rossi, Stanislav Chren, José Miguel Blanco
TL;DR
This paper addresses the lack of a comprehensive PN-centric overview for Smart Grids by conducting a scoping review to map Petri Net variants, application areas, modeling aspects, and evaluation methods across SG infrastructures. It identifies four main SG areas—management, reliability, networking, and security—where PN applications are concentrated, with standard PN prevalent in management and reliability and more diverse PN variants in networking and security. The study highlights a mix of artificial and realistic evaluations, a scarcity of real-world data, and limited replication, underscoring the need for open datasets and shared implementations. Collectively, the work provides a foundational map of PN usage in SGs and points to future research directions to improve realism, comparability, and practical impact.
Abstract
Since the energy domain is in a transformative shift towards sustainability, the integration of new technologies and smart systems into traditional power grids has emerged. As an effective approach, Petri Nets (PN) have been applied to model and analyze the complex dynamics in Smart Grid (SG) environments. However, we are currently missing an overview of types of PNs applied to different areas and problems related to SGs. Therefore, this paper proposes four fundamental research questions related to the application areas of PNs in SGs, PNs types, aspects modelled by PNs in the identified areas, and the validation methods in the evaluation. The answers to the research questions are derived from a comprehensive and interdisciplinary literature analysis. The results capture a valuable overview of PNs applications in the global energy landscape and can offer indications for future research directions.