Communication Dualism in Distributed Systems with Petri Net Interpretation

TL;DR

This paper formalizes the concept of communication dualism in distributed systems using Petri nets, showing it as a fundamental property that encompasses both message passing and variable sharing within a unified framework.

Contribution

It introduces a formal Petri net interpretation of communication dualism in distributed systems and presents an automatic process extraction method within this framework.

Findings

Communication dualism is a fundamental property of distributed systems.

Distributed systems can be modeled as either message-passing or variable-sharing processes.

A method for automatic process extraction in Petri net models is proposed.

Abstract

In the paper notion of communication dualism id formalized and explained in Petri net interpretation. We consider communication dualism a basic property of communication in distributed systems. The formalization is done in the Integrated Model of Distributed Systems (IMDS) where synchronous communication, as well as asynchronous message-passing and variable-sharing are modeled in a common framework. In the light of this property, communication in distributed systems can be seen as a two-dimensional phenomenon with passing being its spatial dimension and sharing its temporal dimension. Any distributed system can be modeled as a composition of message-passes asynchronous processes or as a composition of variable-sharing asynchronous processes. A method of automatic process extraction in Petri net interpretation of IMDS is presented.