4,152 research outputs found
Abridged Petri Nets
A new graphical framework, Abridged Petri Nets (APNs) is introduced for
bottom-up modeling of complex stochastic systems. APNs are similar to
Stochastic Petri Nets (SPNs) in as much as they both rely on component-based
representation of system state space, in contrast to Markov chains that
explicitly model the states of an entire system. In both frameworks, so-called
tokens (denoted as small circles) represent individual entities comprising the
system; however, SPN graphs contain two distinct types of nodes (called places
and transitions) with transitions serving the purpose of routing tokens among
places. As a result, a pair of place nodes in SPNs can be linked to each other
only via a transient stop, a transition node. In contrast, APN graphs link
place nodes directly by arcs (transitions), similar to state space diagrams for
Markov chains, and separate transition nodes are not needed.
Tokens in APN are distinct and have labels that can assume both discrete
values ("colors") and continuous values ("ages"), both of which can change
during simulation. Component interactions are modeled in APNs using triggers,
which are either inhibitors or enablers (the inhibitors' opposites).
Hierarchical construction of APNs rely on using stacks (layers) of submodels
with automatically matching color policies. As a result, APNs provide at least
the same modeling power as SPNs, but, as demonstrated by means of several
examples, the resulting models are often more compact and transparent,
therefore facilitating more efficient performance evaluation of complex
systems.Comment: 17 figure
Separation of Circulating Tokens
Self-stabilizing distributed control is often modeled by token abstractions.
A system with a single token may implement mutual exclusion; a system with
multiple tokens may ensure that immediate neighbors do not simultaneously enjoy
a privilege. For a cyber-physical system, tokens may represent physical objects
whose movement is controlled. The problem studied in this paper is to ensure
that a synchronous system with m circulating tokens has at least d distance
between tokens. This problem is first considered in a ring where d is given
whilst m and the ring size n are unknown. The protocol solving this problem can
be uniform, with all processes running the same program, or it can be
non-uniform, with some processes acting only as token relays. The protocol for
this first problem is simple, and can be expressed with Petri net formalism. A
second problem is to maximize d when m is given, and n is unknown. For the
second problem, the paper presents a non-uniform protocol with a single
corrective process.Comment: 22 pages, 7 figures, epsf and pstricks in LaTe
Modelling Requirements for Content Recommendation Systems
This paper addresses the modelling of requirements for a content
Recommendation System (RS) for Online Social Networks (OSNs). On OSNs, a user
switches roles constantly between content generator and content receiver. The
goals and softgoals are different when the user is generating a post, as
opposed as replying to a post. In other words, the user is generating instances
of different entities, depending on the role she has: a generator generates
instances of a "post", while the receiver generates instances of a "reply".
Therefore, we believe that when addressing Requirements Engineering (RE) for
RS, it is necessary to distinguish these roles clearly.
We aim to model an essential dynamic on OSN, namely that when a user creates
(posts) content, other users can ignore that content, or themselves start
generating new content in reply, or react to the initial posting. This dynamic
is key to designing OSNs, because it influences how active users are, and how
attractive the OSN is for existing, and to new users. We apply a well-known
Goal Oriented RE (GORE) technique, namely i-star, and show that this language
fails to capture this dynamic, and thus cannot be used alone to model the
problem domain. Hence, in order to represent this dynamic, its relationships to
other OSNs' requirements, and to capture all relevant information, we suggest
using another modelling language, namely Petri Nets, on top of i-star for the
modelling of the problem domain. We use Petri Nets because it is a tool that is
used to simulate the dynamic and concurrent activities of a system and can be
used by both practitioners and theoreticians.Comment: 28 pages, 7 figure
Artifact Lifecycle Discovery
Artifact-centric modeling is a promising approach for modeling business
processes based on the so-called business artifacts - key entities driving the
company's operations and whose lifecycles define the overall business process.
While artifact-centric modeling shows significant advantages, the overwhelming
majority of existing process mining methods cannot be applied (directly) as
they are tailored to discover monolithic process models. This paper addresses
the problem by proposing a chain of methods that can be applied to discover
artifact lifecycle models in Guard-Stage-Milestone notation. We decompose the
problem in such a way that a wide range of existing (non-artifact-centric)
process discovery and analysis methods can be reused in a flexible manner. The
methods presented in this paper are implemented as software plug-ins for ProM,
a generic open-source framework and architecture for implementing process
mining tools
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