Modelling and Analysis of Mobile Computing Systems: An Extended Petri Nets Formalism

In its basic version, Petri Nets are defined as fixed graphs, where the behaviour of the system is modelled as the marking of the graph which changes over time. This constraint makes the Petri Nets a poor tool to deal with reconfigurable systems as mobile computing systems, where the structure of the system can change as its behaviour, during time. Many extended Petri nets were proposed to deal with this weakness. The aim of this work is to present a new extension of Petri Nets, where the structure of the graph can be highly flexible. This flexibility gives a rich model with complex behaviours, not allowed in previous extensions. The second aim is to prove that even these behaviours are so complex; they can be translated into other low level models (as Coloured Petri Nets [21]) and so be analysed. This translation exploits Dynamic Petri Nets [11] as an intermediary representation between our model and Coloured Petri Nets.