Information services have evolved from centralized monolithic systems to distributed and intelligent systems especially empowered with the emerging technologies such as big data, artificial intelligence, Internet of Things (IoTs). Papers included in this special issue mainly cover the topics of Petri net, cloud and fog computing, social networks, and deep neural networks. The following sections briefly introduce these papers.Workflow has been playing an increasing role in modern information systems. Xiang and Liu [9] employed WFD-net, a special form of Petri net, to build a guarddriven reachability graph for correctness verification of data flows dealing with the cases that data might be missing, inconsistent, lost and redundant. According to Feng et al. [10], there is an increasing demand for business intelligence automatically extracted from event logs and process mining plays a critical role in business process management. This paper presents a new Petri net alignment to improve the efficiency in process mining. In [11], Cheng et al. presented a comprehensive learning particle swarm optimization algorithm based on fuzzy Petri net and applied it to diagnose the faults of a complex motor system. According to Li et al. [8], there is a growing research interest in imbuing robots not only with the capability of perception and planning but also the capability of learning. This paper models the behaviours of a robot into a Petri net which facilitates the learning capability of the robot. In [12], Teng et al. modelled processing mining with a logic Petri net with an aim to deal with structures which might be incomplete and concurrent to better reflect the reality of business processes.