Towards Evolving Petri Nets: a Symmetric Nets-based Framework

Abstract

Despite Petri Nets represent a sound and expressive formal model for distributed discrete-event systems, they cannot specify in a natural way structural changes that are likely to occur in adaptable and evolvable distributed applications running in a dynamically changing environment. In this paper we propose a framework based on the Symmetric Net formalism able to emulate the behavior of any Place/Transition net and safely plan/apply structural changes during the execution of the emulated system. The intrinsic characteristics of Symmetric Nets may reduce the complexity of verification activities exploiting symbolic structures in reachability analysis. Moreover, powerful off-the-shelf software tools, that natively support Symmetric Nets, can be exploited to ease both the modeling and the analysis phases.