PN2: An Elementary Model for Design and Analysis of Multi-agent Systems

  • Authors:
  • Kunihiko Hiraishi

  • Affiliations:
  • -

  • Venue:
  • COORDINATION '02 Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages
  • Year:
  • 2002

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Abstract

Agent technology is widely recognized as a new paradigm for design of concurrent software and systems. The aim of this paper is to give a mathematical foundation for design and analysis of multi-agent systems by means of a Petri-net-based model. The proposed model, called PN2, is based on place/transition nets (P/T nets), which is one of the simplest classes of Petri nets. The main difference between PN2s and P/T nets is that each token, representing an agent, is also a P/T net. State equation and invariants are known as standard techniques for the analysis of P/T nets. As the first step of mathematical analysis of PN2s, we define these for PN2s, and show how the invariants are computed in an efficient way.