Deciding Life-Cycle Inheritance on Petri Nets

One of the key issues of object-oriented modeling is inheritance. It allows for the definition of a subclass that inherits features from some superclass. When considering the dynamic behavior of objects, as captured by their life cycles, there is no general agreement on the meaning of inheritance. Basten and Van der Aalst introduced the notion of life-cycle inheritance for this purpose. Unfortunately, the search tree needed for deciding life-cycle inheritance is in general prohibitively large. This paper presents a backtracking algorithm to decide life-cycle inheritance on Petri nets. The algorithm uses structural properties of both the base life cycle and the potential sub life cycle to prune the search tree. Test cases show that the results are promising.