Résumé: Fuzzy Petri nets (FPNs) are a powerful modeling tool for the knowledge representation and reasoning of expert systems. During the past decades, a variety of models and methods have been developed to improve the performance of FPNs. However, there is a lack of a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the literature on the FPN topic. The objective of this paper is to conduct a bibliometric analysis of the FPN studies to generate a global picture of developments, focus areas, and research trends in this field. To achieve this goal, 272 journal articles extracted from the Web of Science over the period of 2000 to 2022 were analyzed with respect to cooperation network, co-citation network, and keyword co-occurrence network. The findings indicate that annual publication on the FPNs has increased rapidly since 2018. The cooperation network analysis shows that the most prolific authors in the area are Hu-Chen Liu from Tongji University and Victor R. L. Shen from National Taipei University. Via the co-citation network analysis, the influential authors are identified as Shyi-Ming Chen, Carl G. Looney, Tadao Murata, and the emerging research trends are obtained as “fault diagnosis”, “failure mode and effect analysis”, and “knowledge representation”. The keyword network analysis shows that the hot research topics in the FPN area are “expert system”, “knowledge representation”, “fault diagnosis” and “fuzzy reasoning”. Finally, according to the current research trends, possible future research directions concerning FPNs are revealed. This study provides important reference for both scholars and practitioners to grasp the research status, hot topics, and future research agenda of the FPN domain.

Langue: Anglais