In: Special Issue of High Speed Networks, Computer Communciations Journal, Vol. 19, No. 1, pages 39-48. Elsevier, January 1996.
Abstract: As high speed networking becomes more widespread and increasingly accessible from home, a huge variety of new vendors and services will become available to consumers. These services will fall into three main categories: information services, shopping and entertainment. One of the major problems facing an increasingly information-rich society is how to quickly and conventiently locate information which is provided by different servers throughout a large distributed system. The Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) deals with the problem of locating servies/resources in a heterogeneous open distributed system through the standardization of a Trading function which is realized by a Trader. To increase our understanding of a Trader's dynamic behaviour, a CPN model has been created. The Trader's computational viewpoint has been modelled using a hierarchy of CPNs which allow functional blocks to be modelled separately and their inter-relationships defined. A discussion of the model and techniques for its analysis are presented.
Keywords: Open distributed processing; Trader; Coloured Petri net.