On efficient analysis of agent-oriented Petri net PN{sup}2 - behavior- preserving reduction method

摘要

As an extended model of Petri nets, agent-oriented Petri nets are proposed for modeling multi-agent systems. PN{sup}2 has been proposed as an elementary class of agent-oriented Petri nets. PN{sup}2 consists of two layers of Petri nets - the upper layer is called an environmental net, and the Petri nets in the lower layer are called agent nets which act as tokens of the environment net. For PN{sup}2, reachability analysis using the incidence matrix is proposed, where the size of the incidence matrix is determined by the number of states times the number of transitions of each agent net. Therefore, we can reduce the size of the incidence matrix by transforming each agent net to an equivalent one with fewer states and transitions. In this paper, we describe a method for such transformation.