"A survey of Petri nets with evolving structures"
Since their introduction in the early sixties, Petri nets have come to play a pre-eminent role in the formal study of the behaviour of concurrent and distributed systems. More recently their is an increasing interest in extensions of Petri nets that can support dynamic change, task migration, superimposition of various levels of activities and the notion of mode of operations. These concepts are indeed central in the fields of distributed software and computer supported cooperative work (cscw). In this talk I will survey some proposals of extension of Petri nets whose structure is allowed to vary as their execution proceeds. These proposals are classified in three categories:
(1) the Self-modifying nets, their subclass of stratified Petri nets and the reconfigurable nets
(2) Mobile Petri nets which recasts in the context of net theory ideas and concept that originated in the pi-calculus and the related join calculus, and
(3) Object Petri nets that aims to incorporate features of object-oriented languages in Petri nets.