In: Nivat, M.: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1378: Proceedings of 5th Intern. Conf. on Foundations of Software Science and Computation Structures (FOSSaCS'98) held as part of the Europ. Conf. on Theory and Practice of Software, ETAPS'98 in Lisbon, Portugal, pages 190-202. Springer, April 1998.
Abstract: The theory of graph grammars is concerned with the rule-based transformation of graphs and graph-like structures. As the formalism of Petri nets is founded on a particular type of graphs, the various net refinement methods proposed for their structured design are in particular graph transformations. This paper aims at applying a recently developed technique for graph rewriting, the so-called pullback approach, to describe net refinement. The translation of the this technique, which is based on (hyper)graph morphisms, into terms of net morphisms yields a well-defined mechanism closely related to pullback rewriting in hypergraphs. A variant allows to elegantly characterize a particular net refinement operation which modifies the context of the refined transition.