Modelling the Structure and Behaviour of Petri Net Agents

Abstract

This work proposes a way to model the structure and behaviour of agents in terms of executable coloured Petri net protocols. Structure and behaviour are not all aspects of agent based computing: agents need a world to live in (mostly divided into platforms), they need a general structure (e.g. including a standard interface for communication) and their own special behaviour. Our approach tackles all three parts in terms of Petri nets. This paper skips the topic of agent platforms and handles the agent structure briefly to introduce a key concept of our work: the graphical modelling of the behaviour of autonomous and adaptive agents. A special kind of coloured Petri nets is being used throughout the work: reference nets. Complex agent behaviour is achieved via dynamic composition of simpler sub-protocols, a task that reference nets are especially well suited for. The inherent concurrency of Petri nets is another point that makes it easy to model agents: multiple threads of control are (nearly) automatically implied in Petri nets.