Modeling lessons in classical ballet through Petri Nets

Petri nets are a mathematical modeling language for the description of distributed systems. They are particularly effective to provide a synthetic, multi-layer graph-ical representation of processes, unveiling aspects such as iterative structures and concurrency. This paper aims to apply Petri nets to the formalization of a typical lesson in classical ballet. After analyzing the basic principles and the commonly accepted rules to structure a ballet class, we will define a net model that can be conveniently modified by changing either its initial marking or the network topol-ogy in order to take into account factors such as lesson duration, the age and skill level of dancers, etc. Such a model can be adopted also to automatically produce a lesson structure with customized features, as demonstrated by the final case study.