Variable Petri Nets for Mobility

TL;DR

This paper introduces Variable Petri Nets, a novel modeling framework designed to effectively represent and analyze mobile and disconnection-prone systems by incorporating virtual places and constraint functions.

Contribution

It proposes a new Petri net model, Variable Petri Net, with definitions, firing rules, and analysis methods tailored for mobile and disconnection-aware systems.

Findings

Successfully models mobile systems with virtual places.

Enhances analysis of component collaboration and system scalability.

Demonstrates effectiveness through multiple examples.

Abstract

Mobile computing systems, service-based systems and some other systems with mobile interacting components have recently received much attention. However, because of their characteristics such as mobility and disconnection, it is difficult to model and analyze them by using a structure-fixed model. This work proposes a new Petri net model called Variable Petri Net (VPN) for modeling and analyzing these systems. The definition, firing rule, and related analysis technology of VPN are introduced in detail. In a VPN, the possible interaction interfaces are abstracted as a new kind of places called virtual places, and the occurrences of (dis)connections are described by new functions, which makes it appropriate to describe the component collaboration in systems and realize the scalability and pluggability of systems. Moreover, to overcome the shortcoming that markings cannot reflect link capability of a system, VPNs add a constraint function along with a marking to represent a complete system configuration. Several examples are used to demonstrate the newly proposed model and method.