Extending G-nets to support inheritance modeling in concurrent object-oriented design

G-Nets are a type of Petri net defined to support modeling of system as a set of independent and loosely-coupled modules. The modular features of G-Nets provide support for incremental design and successive modification, however the G-Net formalism is not fully object-oriented due to a lack of support for inheritance. In this paper, we introduce extensions to G-Nets to support explicit modeling of inheritance. Bounded buffer examples are used, which we define as subclasses of an unbounded buffer, to illustrate the expressive power of the extended G-Net models. Various forms of inheritance are formalized and discussed in the context of concurrent object-oriented design. In addition, the inheritance anomaly problem is examined and discussed.