Introducing Structural Dynamic Changes in Petri Nets: Marked-Controlled Reconfigurable Nets

The aim of this work is the modeling and verification of concurrent systems that are subject to dynamic changes by using extensions of Petri nets. In previous studies, we have introduced net rewriting systems and a subclass of these called reconfigurable nets. In a net rewriting system, a system configuration is described as a Petri net and a change in configuration is described as a graph rewriting rule. A reconfigurable net is a net rewriting system where a change in configuration amounts to a modification in the flow relations of the places in the domain of the involved rule in accordance with this rule, independently of the context in which this rewriting applies. In both models, the enabling of a rule depends only on the net topology. Here we introduce markedcontrolled net rewriting systems and marked-controlled reconfigurable nets where the enabling of a rule also depends on the net marking. We show an implementation of marked-controlled reconfigurable nets with Petri nets. Even though the expressiveness of both models is the same, with marked-controlled reconfigurable nets, we can easily and directly model systems that change their structure dynamically. It may be more efficient to directly implement the methods of verification of properties of Petri nets on the marked-controlled reconfigurable nets model.