In: Dembinski, P.; Sredniawa, M.: Protocol Specification, Testing and Verification XV, pages 71-86. Chapman and Hall, 1996.
Abstract: This paper addresses the problem of designing communication protocols within the Petri net approach. Some recent results in combining Petri nets and compositionality are presented, and it is argued that it should be possible to exploit these for protocol engineering. A systematic approach to the design of protocol systems is outlined. At the top level, Petri net entities are used together with a set of operations. The external behavior of entities is characterized using the notion of a bisimulation equivalence. At a lower level of design, it is shown how entities can be constructed from protocol procedures using suitable composition rules. The relationship between syntactic and behavioral notions of compositionality is also discussed.
Keywords: Petri nets, bisimulation equivalence, communication protocols, compositionality, protocol engineering, protocol hierarchy.