In: Nielsen, M.; Simpson, D.: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1825: 21st International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets (ICATPN 2000), Aarhus, Denmark, June 2000, pages 83-102. Springer-Verlag, 2000.
Abstract: Distributed systems are often composed by many heterogeneous agents that can work concurrently and exchange information. Therefore, in their modeling via PT nets we must be aware that the basic activities of each system can vary in duration and can be constituted by smaller internal activities, i.e., transitions are conceptually refined into transactions. We address the issue of modeling transactions in distributed systems by using zero-safe nets, which extend PT nets with a simple mechanism for transition synchronization. In particular, starting from the zero-safe net that represents a certain system, we give a distributed algorithm for executing the transactions of the system as transitions of a more abstract PT net. Among the advantages of our approach, we emphasize that the zero-safe net can be much smaller than its abstract counterpart, due to the synchronization mechanism.