Versatile Boxes: a Multi-Purpose Algebra of High-Level Petri nets
Franck Pommereau
Summer Computer Simulation Conference 2007 (SCSC 2007)
San Diego, California (USA), July 15-18, 2007
Abstract
This paper introduces a model of composable Petri nets, called Versatile Boxes, that has all the high level features already introduced in the family of the Petri Box Calculus (mainly: data and time representation) as well as a new interruption capability. This allows for defining processes that are able to interrupt their execution at any point, like a program can raise an exception. By choosing a carefully tuned level a generality, we are able to obtain a setting that is much simpler than previous approaches, while still allowing to give the semantics of the usual programming language constructs. We believe that our model has the required characteristics for a very general usage, hence its name, while keeping a reasonable complexity and so being easy to understand or implement and efficient for verification or simulation purpose.