PhD. Thesis, Technical University Berlin, pages 1-178. Shaker Verlag, 1996.
Abstract: The aim of this thesis is twofold: The first aim is to provide a formal basis for a uniform approach to Petri nets including several different net classes as special cases. The second aim is to study rule-based refinement for Petri nets in order to support software system development based on Petri net techniques. To attain a formal basis for different classes of Petri nets - the first contribution of this thesis - we introduce the concept of abstract Petri nets, in a low-level and a high-level version. The essential point for low-level abstract Petri nets is to allow different kinds of net structures. High-level abstract Petri nets additionally allow the combination of various kinds of data types and net structures. The second contribution of this thesis is a uniform approach to rule-based refinement of Petri nets. This new kind of refinement is based on the replacement of subnets and can be applied to different kinds of Petri net classes. We show the compatibility of rule-based refinement with well-known structuring techniques, called union and fusion. The usefulness of our concepts is exemplified in a case study.
Keywords: Category Theory; Rule-Based Refinement; Transformation; High-Level Nets; Requirements Engineering.