Bisimilarity and behaviour-preserving reconfigurations of open Petri nets

Abstract

We propose a framework for the specification of behaviour-preserving reconfigurations of systems modelled as Petri nets. The framework is based on open nets, a mild generalisation of ordinary Place/ Transition nets suited to model open systems which might interact with the surrounding environment and endowed with a colimit-based composition operation. We show that natural notions of (strong and weak) bisimilarity over open nets are congruences with respect to the composition operation. We also provide an up-to technique for facilitating bisimilarity proofs. The theory is used to identify suitable classes of reconfiguration rules (in the double-pushout approach to rewriting) whose application preserves the observational semantics of the net. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.