Abstract
This paper presents a fuzzy reasoning Petri net (FRPN) model to represent a fuzzy production rule-based system. The issues of how to represent and reason about rules containing negative literals are addressed in the proposed PN model. The execution rules based on the model are defined formally using the operators in max-algebra. Then, a fuzzy reasoning algorithm is proposed to perform fuzzy reasoning automatically. The algorithm is consistent with the matrix equation expression method in the traditional PNs and allows one to exploit the maximum parallel reasoning potential embedded in the model. The legitimacy and feasibility of the proposed approach are proved and validated through a turbine fault diagnosis expert system.