In: Journal of Systems and Software, Vol. 15, No. 3, pages 239-250. July 1991.
Abstract: This paper considers the use of Petri nets in the system design process. It proposes a new class of Petri nets called Information Flow Nets (IFNs) which are particularly suitable for performing refinement in the system design. The author first defines the class of IFNs. The notion of a `well-behaved IFN' is then defined and a top-down refinement technique is presented. The conditions required for the refinement technique to preserve the properties of a well-behaved IFN are derived. The author proves that a refined IFN N'', obtained by substituting a well-behaved IFN N' in a well-behaved IFN N, is itself well-behaved.
Keywords: system design (and) top-down refinement; well-behaved information flow net; hierarchical organization.