In: Billington, J.; Diaz, M.; Rozenberg, G.: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 1605: Application of Petri Nets to Communication Networks, pages 37-68. Springer-Verlag, 1999.
Abstract: The paper examines how object-oriented extensions to the Petri net formalism provide flexible structuring primitives which can aid the modeling of network protocols. A key benefit is the support for incremental modeling. As a result, a protocol can be modeled as a collection of services, each of which can be expressed as the enhancements of a basic service, in which case, both the structure of the basic service and the nature of the enhancement can be clearly identified. More importantly, the evaluation of a protocol through a sequence of standards can be expressed by progressive refinements. The object-oriented extensions are captured in the formalism of object Petri nets, with a textual language form to as LOOPN++, both of which are introduced in this paper. The incremental modeling capabilities and their benefits are demonstrated for the Z39.50 protocol for information retrieval.
Keywords: Z39.50 protocol, communication protocols, incremental modeling, object Petri nets.