Merging relations: a way to compact Petri nets' behaviors uniformly

Compacting Petri nets behaviors means to develop a more succinct representation of all the possible executions of a net, still giving the capability to reason on properties fulfilled by the computations of the net. To do so suitable equivalences on alternative executions have to be engineered. We introduce a general notion of merging relation covering the existing approaches to compact behaviors and we discuss how to enforce that the more succinct net is an unravel net, namely a net where dependencies can be identified (almost) syntactically.