Formal Development of Concurrent Systems using Algebraic High-Level Nets and Transformations

Towards Algebraic High-Level Systems as Weak Adhesive HLR Categories

In the area of Petri nets, many different developments have taken place within the last 30 years, in academia as well as in practice. For an adequate use in practice, a coherent and application oriented combination of various types and techniques for Petri nets is necessary. In order to attain a formal basis for different classes of Petri nets we introduce the concept of abstract Petri nets. The essential point of abstract Petri nets is to allow different kinds of net structures as well as the combination of various kinds of data types. This means that in abstract Petri nets the data type and the net structure part can be considered as abstract parameters which can be instantiated to different concrete net classes. We show that several net classes, like place/transition nets, elementary nets, S-graphs, algebraic high-level nets, and predicate/transitions nets are instantiations of abstract Petri nets. Moreover, we discuss coloured Petri nets in this context.KeywordsPredicate LogicForgetful FunctorUniform ApproachSpeci CationSignature Morphism

The role of formal methods for software specification and transformation is discussed, and it is shown how algebraic concepts can support the software development process. Algebraic specification techniques in general are discussed, as are the formal specification languages Act One and Lotos for data types, software systems, and distributed systems. The specification languages are introduced together with an environment of tools developed within the ESPRIT projects Sedos and Lotosphere. Specification and transformation for modular software systems are supported by the concept of algebraic module specification, including mechanisms for horizontal structuring, which is built in Act Two, and vertical refinement. Compatibility results for horizontal and vertical development steps are given and applied to modular specification development of a parts system.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Firstly, net theory, which is a well established theory of distributed systems and processes [I] relies heavily on a graphical notation. One of the strengths of this theory is that many of the fundamental notions concerning concurrent systems and in particular, the dynamics of a concurrent systemcan be made transparent with the help of simple net diagrams and transformations of such diagrams. It is important to provide a solid formal foundation to this aspect of net theory and graph grammars appear to be the obvious tool for doing so. The second motivation is that in the study of concurrency problems that arise within the area of graph grammars [2] we think it is possible and fruitful to apply the concepts and techniques of net theory.

Absiract ln this paper we present algebraic high-level nets: a combination of algebraic specifications and Pctri nets.Algebraic specifications are used to specify the data.-structureand Petri nets to specify the data.-O.ow.This combination is a very powerful description technique.Moreover we introduce net transformations, net fusions and net unions as structuring techniques.Fusions and unions can be considered as horizontal structuring mechan.isms in the sense that we combine nets to obtain a. new net consisting of the given components.Fusions capture the notion of sharing of subnets, while unions are kinds of net composition.Net transforma.tions are based on conccpts from gra.ph grammars because net refinements are defined via.productions.Transformations can be seen as high-level vertical refinements.Moreover we show compa.tibilitybetween these techniques, i.e. in our framework vertical refinement a.nd horizontal structuring of ncts are compatible.

Net processes correspond to derivation processes in graph grammars

The aim of this paper is to give an introduction how to use categorical methods in a specific field of computer science: The field of high-level-replacement systems has its roots in the well-established theories of formal languages, term rewriting, Petri nets, and graph grammars playing a fundamental role in computer science. More precisely, it is a generalization of the algebraic approach to graph grammars which is based on gluing constructions for graphs defined as pushouts in the category of graphs. The categorical theory of high-level-replacement systems is suitable for the dynamic handling of a large variety of high-level structures in computer science including different kinds of graphs and algebraic specifications. In this paper we discuss the basic principles and techniques from category theory applied in the field of high-level-replacement systems and present some basic results together with the corresponding categorical proof techniques.

Specification and properties of a cache coherence protocol model.- GAMERU: A language for the analysis and design of human communication pragmatics within organizational systems.- Recent results on the complexity of problems related to Petri nets.- Algebraic structure of flows of a regular coloured net.- On equivalent execution semantics of concurrent systems.- Mathematical methods for calculating invariants in Petri nets.- On Petri nets with deterministic and exponentially distributed firing times.- An accurate performance model of CSMA/CD bus LAN.- Petri net models for the ?-calculus.- Fair processes.- Operational Petri net semantics for CCSP.- Infinitary languages of Petri nets and logical sentences.- A strong part of concurrency.- Concurrency and continuity.- Parallel systems specifications with coloured Petri nets and algebraic specifications.- Bibliography of Petri nets.

High-Level net models following the paradigm “nets as tokens” have been studied already in the literature with several interesting applications. In this paper we propose the new paradigm “nets and rules as tokens”, where in addition to nets as tokens also rules as tokens are considered. The rules can be used to change the net structure. This leads to the new concept of high-level net and rule systems, which allows to integrate the token game with rule-based transformations of P/T-systems. The new concept is based on algebraic high-level nets and on the main ideas of graph transformation systems. We introduce the new concept with the case study “House of Philosophers”, a dynamic extension of the well-known dining philosophers. In the main part we present a basic theory for rule-based transformations of P/T-systems and for high-level nets with nets and rules as tokens leading to the concept of high-level net and rule systems.

Graph Rewriting Systems are a powerful formalism for the specification of parallel and distributed systems, and the corresponding theory is rich of results concerning parallelism and concurrency. I will review the main results of the theory of concurrency for the algebraic approach to graph rewriting, emphasizing the relationship with the theory of Petri nets. In fact, graph rewriting systems can be regarded as a proper generalization of Petri nets, where the current state of a system is described by a graph instead of by a collection of tokens. Recently, this point of view allowed for the generalization to graph rewriting of some interesting results and constructions of the concurrent semantics of nets, including processes, unfoldings, and categorical semantics based on pair of adjoint functors.KeywordsDirect DerivationGraph TransformationGraph GrammarAdjoint FunctorHost GraphThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

In the area of specification and modelling of concurrent systems, Petri nets have become a standard tool, and they still work behind the scenes in tools for graph transformation systems (cf. [1]). Moreover there is still potential for crossfertilization between the graph transformation and Petri net community. Even a better understanding of adhesive categories [2] and the related concepts of [3] seems possible in light of the proposed notion of weakly adhesive categories [4], which has emerged during work on the generalization of the co-reflective semantics of Petri nets to the realm of graph transformation and adhesive rewriting systems.KeywordsType ObjectGraph TransformationConcurrent SystemGraph GrammarGraph Transformation SystemThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

There are many techniques for specifying software. However, they are not usually presented in a way that is directly applicable to object-oriented software. This tutorial surveys both operational and descriptive specification techniques, shows how to use them in several popular object-oriented software engineering methods, and provides case studies of developing useful, formal specification mechanisms that are appropriate for object-oriented software engineering.

Petri nets have been proposed initially to model concurrency and distributed systems. The ordinary formalism is so simple with a smart formal background, but it fails in modeling mobility aspects. In spite of this, searchers in mobility modeling domain are attracted by Petri nets, and many extensions have been proposed to treat mobility aspects. Among these, we find Labeled Reconfigurable Nets (LRN), This new formalism allows explicit modeling of computational environments and processes mobility between them. It allows, in a simple and an intuitive approach, modeling mobile code paradigms (mobile agent, code on demand, remote evaluation). In this paper, we propose an approach based on the combined use of Meta-modeling and Graph Grammars to automatically generate a visual modeling tool for LRN, for analysis and simulation purposes. This tool produces graphical models, highly-structured to reach this goal. In our approach, the UML Class diagram formalism is used to define a meta-model of LRN. The meta-modeling tool ATOM3 is used to generate a visual modeling tool according to the proposed LRN meta-model. To generate R-Maude specification of the graphically specified LRN models, we have proposed a graph grammar. Then the reconfigurable rewriting logic language R-Maude can be used to perform the simulation of the resulted R-Maude specification. Our approach is illustrated through examples.

We present a way of combining algebraic specifications and Petri nets for specifying parallel systems formally. The data structure of a system is algebraically specified while its behaviour, and especially the synchronization constraints, are specified by a Petri net-like schema. The semantics of a specification is defined as a class of coloured Petri nets.By investigating the relationship between the different models of a specification and the terminal model — which is equivalent to an ordinary Petri net (a P/T-net) — we deduce some analysis results for such specifications.

Relating SPO and DPO graph rewriting with Petri nets having read, inhibitor and reset arcs