Multi-agent Nets Research Articles

Software development with Petri nets and agents: Approach, frameworks and tool set

Software development – especially of distributed and concurrent systems – requires sophisticated frameworks and tool support for the individual and collaborative development. We present an approach for the development of such systems, which applies concepts, technologies and techniques from agent and Petri net theory as well as from software engineering. The approach is backed by a set of elaborated frameworks and a powerful tool set. The Petri Net-based Agent-Oriented Software Engineering approach ( Paose ) follows the multi-agent paradigm and applies Petri net formalisms as implementation languages. Paose is a comprehensive approach that provides techniques, tools, methods, principles and defined processes. Paose depends on Mulan (Multi-Agent Nets), which is a conceptual framework for a multi-agent platform based on Petri net models. Mulan is modeled and executed in Renew (The Reference Net Workshop), which is an extensible modeling and execution environment for Reference Net-based systems and other modeling techniques. The whole framework landscape constitutes a Petri net IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that supports the development and execution of concurrent and distributed multi-agent systems. The Reference Net formalism includes concepts such as net instances (object-orientation), synchronous channels (communication/synchronization) and a seamless Java integration. In this contribution we present an overview of the frameworks and the tool sets in the context of the Paose approach. We focus in detail on the highlights and the IDE features of Renew , without which the collaborative development of distributed Paose -based software would not be feasible.

Modular Reachability Analysis of Petri Nets for Multiagent Systems

Agent-based or multiagent-based methods have been used to solve a wide variety of problems. Multiagent nets are a variant of extended Petri nets, and they are a formal model-description language for multiagent systems. A system of interest can be simulated, and its properties can be checked by using a multiagent-net model. Reachability analysis is a powerful analysis method to check the reachability property of a system, but unfortunately, the complexity of reachability checking for general Petri nets is EXPSPACE-hard. Modular Petri nets have been proposed to describe discrete-event systems in a modular way. This paper performs a reachability analysis of multiagent nets by using modular Petri nets, proposes a set of transformation rules from a fundamental class of multiagent nets into modular Petri nets, and proves the isomorphism of the state spaces of the multiagent nets and of the generated modular Petri nets. Results of our empirical evaluations show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

On Reachability Analysis of Multi Agent Nets

Petri nets are known as a modeling language for concurrent and distributed systems. In recent years, various object-oriented Petri nets were proposed, and we are proposing a kind of object-oriented Petri nets, called multi agent nets (MANs). In this letter, we consider the reachability analysis of MANs. We propose an algorithm for generating an abstract state space of a multi agent net, and report results of computational experiments.