Compositional Petri Nets in Protocol Engineering

摘要

The paper addresses the problem of designing communication protocols within aframework based on Petri nets and supporting compositionality of structure and behavior. After pointing out that compositionality is an inherent feature of protocols, and as such should be supported by adequate formal basis, the authors outline a systematic approach to the design of protocol systems. The external behavior of entities is characterized using the notion of a bisimulation equivalence. At the lower level of design, the authors show how entities can be constructed from protocol procedures using suitable composition rules, such as sequence, iteration, and disabling. They then discuss the relationship between syntactical and simanitcal (behavioral) notions of compositionality.