He documented Petri nets in 1962 as part of his dissertation, Kommunikation mit Automaten (Communication with automata).

From 1959 until 1962 he worked at the University of Bonn and received his PhD degree in 1962 from the Technische Universität Darmstadt.

From 1963 to 1968 he established and directed the computing centre of Bonn University.

Petri's work significantly advanced the fields of parallel computing and distributed computing, and it helped define the modern studies of complex systems and workflow management systems.

His contributions have been in the broader area of network theory, which includes coordination models and theories of interaction, and eventually led to the formal study of software connectors.