In: Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Applications and Theory of Petri Nets (ICATPN 2003), Eindhoven, The Netherlands, June 23-27, 2003, pages 44-63. Volume 2679 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Wil M. P. van der Aalst and Eike Best (Eds.) --- Springer-Verlag, June 2003.
Abstract: One of the key issues of object-oriented modeling is inheritance. It allows for the definition of a subclass that inherits features from some super-class. When considering the dynamic behavior of objects, as captured by their life cycles, there is no general agreement on the meaning of inheritance. Basten and Van der Aalst introduced the notion of life-cycle inheritance for this purpose. Unfortunately, the search tree needed for deciding life-cycle inheritance is in general prohibitively large. This paper presents a backtracking algorithm to decide life-cycle inheritance on Petri nets. The algorithm uses structural properties of both the base life cycle and the potential sub life cycle to prune the search tree. Test cases show that the results are promising.
Keywords: Object-orientation; workflow; life-cycle inheritance; branching bisimilarity; backtracking; Petri nets; structural properties; T-invariants.