Object Nets for Mobility

摘要

This paper studies mobile agents that act in a distributed name space. The difference between belonging to a name space (where objects can be accessed directly via pointers) and migrating between name spaces (where objects have to be treated as values, that can be copied into network messages) is taken account of by introducing Petri net based formalism, employing the nets-within-nets paradigm. This formalism, called mobile object nets, generalises the well-established theory of elementary object nets, which has seen many applications over the last decade. While mobile object nets provide a solution to the specific modelling problem mentioned above, they are much more generic and not restricted to this domain.