Approaches in unifying Petri nets and the Object-Oriented Approach

Abstract

Introduction There is an increasing interest both in the Object-Oriented and the Petri net community for an integration of the concepts of the two approaches. Although the proposals for objects and Petri nets are numerous and widely different, there seems to be two major trends Objects inside Petri net versus Petri net inside Objects . We state here the basic paradigm of these two trends, and briefly introduce our own approach, which aims at unifying them. 2. Objects inside Petri nets An important trend in the Petri nets community is to increase in various ways the amount of information that is held in the tokens. This trend of thought as eventually developed into domain of its own, usually called high-level Petri nets . Method Object Method_1 Method_3 Method_2 Method Object ethod_4 Method_6 Method_5 z = x.Method_1(y) <x> <y> <z> <x> <y> Tokens are objects Transitions call methods on objects Arcs