In: Valette, R.: Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 815; Application and Theory of Petri Nets 1994, Proceedings 15th International Conference, Zaragoza, Spain, pages 471-490. Springer-Verlag, 1994.
Abstract: The behavior of some kinds of systems features a high rate of dynamic evolution. The system running causes the introduction of new components whereas some others disappear, and links between components are dynamically set: a component sometimes interacts with given components and sometimes with others. It is uneasy to cpature such evolution inside Petri nets whose structure is fixed; but it is necessary to respect the Petri net semantics and keep the possibility to apply the structural analysis technics. The paper introduc es two extensions of Petri nets dealing with this problem, Communicative Nets and Cooperative Nets. They enable to model a system as a collection of nets which encapsulate their behavior, while interacting by means of message sending or a client/server protocol; a net may instantiate another net, and the links between nets are dynamic. An algorithm is given which captues this dynamicity by building a single fixed net whose behavior is equivalent to a whole system.