A basic tool for the modeling of Marked-Controlled Reconfigurable Petri Nets

In [1, 4], we introduced the model of net rewriting systems (NRS) and a subclass of this model, reconfigurable nets (RN), to analyze, simulate and verify concurrent and distributed systems that are subject to structural dynamic changes. Both models arise from two different lines of research that were conducted in the field of the Petri net formalism [6]. The first line covers various proposals for merging Petri nets with graph grammars [2,3,7], while the second line, which is best represented by Valk’s self-modifying nets [8], considers Petri nets whose flow relations can vary at runtime. Reconfigurable nets attempt to combine the most relevant aspects of both of these approaches and constitute a class of models for which each of the fundamental properties of Petri nets (place boundedness, reachability, deadlock and liveness) are decidable. The translation of this model into Petri nets is automatic [4]. This equivalence ensures that the model is amenable to automatic verification tools. In contrast, the class of net rewriting systems is Turing powerful [4]. In [5], we introduced markedcontrolled net rewriting systems (MCNRS) and marked-controlled reconfigurable nets (MCRN) as an extension of net rewriting systems and reconfigurable nets, respectively, where the enabling of a rewriting rule not only depends on the net topology, but also depends on the net marking according to some net places named control places. In MCNRS, a system configuration is described as a Petri net, and a change in configuration is described as a graph rewriting rule, which consists of replacing part of the system (the part that matches the left-hand side of the rewriting rule) with another one (given by the right-hand side of the rewriting rule). A MCRN is a MCNRS where a change in configuration is limited to the modification of the flow relations of the places in the domain of the rewriting rule involved; i.e., the set of places and transitions is left unchanged by rewriting rules. In this work, we introduce a basic tool to analyze the structure and dynamic behavior of systems that are modeled using our nets in order to evaluate them and suggest improvements or changes. The goal of our MCReNet tool is to analyze, simulate, and verify real systems that are modeled by MCRN. On the basis of the equivalence between Petri nets and MCRN [5], we have initially