Techniques of petri net reduction

Petri Nets have the capability to analyze large and complex concurrent systems. However, there is one constraint. The number of reachability states of the concurrent systems outweighs the capability of Petri Nets. Previous Petri Net reduction techniques focussed on reducing a subnet to a single transition and hence not powerful enough to reduce a Petri Net. This paper presents six reduction rules and discusses their drawbacks. A new reduction technique called Knitting Technique to delete paths of a Petri Net while retaining all the properties of the original net is presented. Further Structural matrix which facilitates reduction is presented

Eco-evolutionary dynamics in fragmented landscapes

Peer reviewedPostprin

"Minimal metabolism": A key concept to investigate the origins and nature of biological systems

The systems view on life and its emergence from complex chemistry has remarkably increased the scientific attention on metabolism in the last two decades. However, during this time there has not been much theoretical discussion on what constitutes a metabolism and what role it actually played in biogenesis. A critical and updated review on the topic is here offered, including some references to classical models from last century, but focusing more on current and future research. Metabolism is considered as intrinsically related to the living but not necessarily equivalent to it. More precisely, the idea of "minimal metabolism", in contrast to previous, top-down conceptions, is formulated as a heuristic construct, halfway between chemistry and biology. Thus, rather than providing a complete or final characterization of metabolism, our aim is to encourage further investigations on it, particularly in the context of life's origin, for which some concrete methodological suggestions are provided.This work was carried out as part of a Horizon 2020 Marie Curie ITN ("ProtoMet"-Grant Agreement no. 813873 with the European Commission), within which NL obtained a PhD fellowship. KR-M also acknowledges support from the Basque Government (Grant IT 122819) and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2019-104576GB-I00

Towards formal models and languages for verifiable Multi-Robot Systems

Incorrect operations of a Multi-Robot System (MRS) may not only lead to unsatisfactory results, but can also cause economic losses and threats to safety. These threats may not always be apparent, since they may arise as unforeseen consequences of the interactions between elements of the system. This call for tools and techniques that can help in providing guarantees about MRSs behaviour. We think that, whenever possible, these guarantees should be backed up by formal proofs to complement traditional approaches based on testing and simulation. We believe that tailored linguistic support to specify MRSs is a major step towards this goal. In particular, reducing the gap between typical features of an MRS and the level of abstraction of the linguistic primitives would simplify both the specification of these systems and the verification of their properties. In this work, we review different agent-oriented languages and their features; we then consider a selection of case studies of interest and implement them useing the surveyed languages. We also evaluate and compare effectiveness of the proposed solution, considering, in particular, easiness of expressing non-trivial behaviour.Comment: Changed formattin