Extending Petri Nets for Modeling and Analysis of Reconfigurable Systems

Abstract

Petri nets are a formal and graphical tool proposed to model and to analyze behavior of concurrent systems. In its basic version, this model is defined as a fixed graph, where the behavior of the system is modeled as the marking of the graph that changes over time. This constraint makes the Petri Nets a poor tool to deal with reconfigurable systems where the structure of the system can change as its behavior, during time. Many extended Petri nets were proposed to deal with this weakness. The aim of this work is to present an extension where the structure of the graph can be highly flexible. This flexibility gives a rich model with complex behaviors, not allowed in previous extensions. The second aim is to prove that even these behaviors are so complex; they can be encoded in other models and so be analyzed.