Pure Petri Nets for Software Verification and Validation of Semantic Web Services in Graphical Worlds

Software verification and validation (SVV) are major ingredients of current software engineering projects. Among the available methods to solve this problem, formal methods (although very costly at the computational level) are arguably the most powerful ones. One of the most promising approaches in this field is that based on Petri nets. This paper discusses some issues regarding the application of Petri nets to SVV from a hybrid mathematical/computational point of view. The paper also describes a Mathematica package developed by the author for a class of Petri nets, which is applied to address the SVV problem in the context of graphical semantic web services based on virtual agents evolving in digital 3D worlds.