A compositional Petri net translation of general <i>π</i> -calculus terms

Abstract

Abstract We propose a finite structural translation of possibly recursive π -calculus terms into Petri nets. This is achieved by using high-level nets together with an equivalence on markings in order to model entering into recursive calls, which do not need to be guarded. We view a computing system as consisting of a main program ( π -calculus term) together with procedure declarations (recursive definitions of π -calculus identifiers). The control structure of these components is represented using disjoint high-level Petri nets, one for the main program and one for each of the procedure declarations. The program is executed once, while each procedure can be invoked several times (even concurrently), each such invocation being uniquely identified by structured tokens which correspond to the sequence of recursive calls along the execution path leading to that invocation.