In: 2: Int. J. Comput. Math., Vol. 34 No. 1, pages 13-31. 1990.
Abstract: The author 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 describes the behaviour of these nets and some of their useful properties, such as clean termination. The notion of a ``well-behaved IFN'' is then defined and a top-down refinement technique is presented which allows to construct well-behaved IFNs. The conditions required for the refinement technique to preserve the properties of a well-behaved IFN are derived. The significance of such a technique is that it can be used to build systems that are automatically well-behaved.
Keywords: system design (and) refinement. well-behaved information flow net; top-down refinement; well-behavedness preservation.