US Army CERDEC

This paper introduces and describes a new extension to Petri-Nets that provide additional mechanisms for the modeling of dynamic, distributed and concurrent behavior. The extensions provide for the creation and destruction of conventional Petri-Net Places and Transitions providing dynamic behavior of Petri-Net operation. We call this new Petri-Net model Dynamic Petri-Nets (DPN). With this new model, the structure of the Petri-Net, i.e. the interconnection of Places and Transitions, will evolve over time. The paper introduces specific rules for the Place/Transition modifications, and presents some new and well known properties of Petri-Nets under these modifications. A Many Sorted Algebraic model of the DPN is presented that formally describes the techniques and relationships presented informally. Finally, an example of the use of these extensions is presented to represent the broadcast nature of mobile ad hoc and distributed sensor networks