Variable Petri Nets for Mobility
This work addresses the problem of modeling mobile computing systems for researchers and engineers, but it appears incremental as it builds upon existing Petri net frameworks.
The authors tackled the challenge of modeling mobile and disconnected systems by proposing Variable Petri Nets (VPN), which introduce virtual places and constraint functions to represent system configurations, enabling scalable and pluggable component collaboration.
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.