This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on the Application and Theory of Petri Nets, ICATPN'97, held in Toulouse, France, in June 1997.The 22 revised full papers presented in the volume were selected from a total of 61 submissions;

Model checking LTL using constraint programming.- On the composition of timed systems.- Some issues about Petri net application to manufacturing and process supervisory control.- On the abstraction of coloured Petri Nets.- Life-cycle inheritance.- Multi-agent-systems based on coloured Petri nets.- On the complexity of the linear-time ?-calculus for Petri Nets.- Improved implementations via a new structural equivalence on labeled nets.- Time processes for time Petri nets.- Timed Petri nets and temporal linear logic.- Efficient handling of Phase-type distributions in generalized stochastic Petri nets.- Petri's axioms of concurrency a selection of recent results.- Analysis of Petri nets with a dynamic priority method.- A compositional partial order semantics for Petri net components.- Covering step graph preserving failure semantics.- Siphons, traps and high-level nets with infinite color domains.- Teaching Coloured Petri Nets — a gentle introduction to formal methods in a distributed systems course.- Transition systems of Elementary Net Systems with inhibitor arcs.- Coupling asynchrony and interrupts: Place Chart Nets.- Modeling and solving constraint satisfaction problems through Petri nets.- Fault detection in telecommunication networks based on a Petri net representation of alarm propagation.- Analysing bang & Olufsen's BeoLink® audio/video system using coloured Petri nets.- Verification of workflow nets.- Verification of siphons and traps for algebraic Petri nets.- Orthogonal transformations for coloured Petri nets.