Task Suspension in Agent Systems

We discuss the similarity of a recent approach to task suspension in agent programming languages with an earlier approach to formalising preemption using a class of Petri nets, called M-nets. We argue that the theory of agent programming would benefit from adopting certain features of the Petri-net approach, and thus making further results for Petri nets applicable in the agent domain

A class of composable and preemptible high-level Petri nets with an application to multi-tasking systems

International audienceThis paper presents an extension of an algebra of high-level Petri nets with operations for suspension and abortion. These operations are sound with respect to the semantics of preemption, and can be applied to the modelling of the semantics of high-level parallel programming languages with preemption-related features. As an illustration, the paper gives an application to the modelling of a multi-tasking system in a parallel programming language, which is provided with a concurrent semantics based on Petri nets and for which implemented tools can be used