In: Proc. 1998 Int. Conf. on Application of Concurrency to System Design (CSD'98), 23-26 March 1998, Fukushima, Japan, pages 239-249. 1998.
Abstract: This paper presents an approach to giving a formal meaning to petri nets defined using equations. It specifically addresses this problem for the box algebra, a model of concurrent computation which combines Petri nets and standard process algebra. The paper presents a detailed investigation of the solvability of recursive equations on nets in a setting which allows infinite number of possibly unguarded equations, each equation possibly involving infinitely many recursion variables. The main result is that by using a suitable partially ordered domain of nets, it is always possible to solve a system of equations by constructing the limit of a chain of successive approximations starting from a suitable, very simple net.
Keywords: box calculus, process algebras, recursive Petri nets.