Using Agents for Simulating and Implementing Petri Nets

This paper presents a software architecture for simulating and implementing Petri nets. It is based on objectoriented techniques and autonomous agents. Objectorientation enables the adaptation and extension of the software architecture with new or alternatively defined features. Agents allow to model a net as a set of autonomous, cooperating entities. The result is a flexible and extendible framework of reusable components for efficiently implementing a large family of Petri net classes. The execution can be performed on a mono-processor, a parallel or distributed system. This is the result of using the XENOOPS execution environments for parallel applications. 1 Introduction Petri nets are a commonly used formalism for modelling and analysing complex concurrent systems. They make a simple, yet powerful visual formalism for describing concurrency, synchronization, causality and nondeterminism between system activities. Besides the fact that Petri nets lean themselves to deriving usefu..