Membrane Systems and Petri Net Synthesis

Automated synthesis from behavioural specifications is an attractive and powerful way of constructing concurrent systems. Here we focus on the problem of synthesising a membrane system from a behavioural specification given in the form of a transition system which specifies the desired state space of the system to be constructed. We demonstrate how a Petri net solution to this problem, based on the notion of region of a transition system, yields a method of automated synthesis of membrane systems from state spaces.Comment: In Proceedings MeCBIC 2012, arXiv:1211.347

Communication requirements for team automata

Compatibility of components is an important issue in the quest for systems of systems that guarantee successful communications, free from message loss and indefinite waiting for inputs. In this paper, we investigate compatibility in the context of systems consisting of reactive components which may communicate through the synchronised execution of common actions. We model such systems in the team automata framework, which does not impose any a priori restrictions on the synchronisation policy followed to combine the components. We identify a family of representative synchronisation types based on the number of sending and receiving components participating in synchronisations. Then, we provide a generic procedure to derive, for each synchronisation type, requirements for receptiveness and for responsiveness of team automata that prevent that outputs are not accepted and inputs are not provided, respectively. Due to the genericity of our approach w.r.t. synchronisation policies, we can capture compatibility notions for various multi-component system models known from the literature.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Recent advances in petri nets and concurrency

CEUR Workshop Proceeding

Processes of Membrane Systems with Promoters and Inhibitors

Membrane systems (with promoters and inhibitors) are a computational model inspired by the way living cells are divided by membranes into compartments where chemical reactions may take place. We consider synchrony and asynchrony between executed reactions in the computations of such systems using Petri nets and their processes as a formal behavioural model. We first discuss different definitions of individual computational steps, and show how they can be rendered within the Petri net domain by assigning all transitions localities corresponding to the compartments, and using activator and inhibitor arcs. The non-sequential semantics of the resulting nets is formalised through processes based on occurrence nets augmented with additional information about localities and activator/inhibitor arcs. Such processes provide a convenient tool for analysing synchrony and asynchrony in the executions of membrane systems and shed light on the causal relationships between the reactions taking place

Steps and coverability in inhibitor sets

For Petri nets with inhibitor arcs, properties like reachability and boundedness are undecidable and hence constructing a coverability tree is not feasible. Here it is investigated to what extent the coverability tree construction might be adapted for Petri nets with inhibitor arcs. Emphasis is given to the (a priori) step sequence semantics which cannot always be simulated by firing sequences. All this leads to the notion of a step coverability tree which may be of use for the analysis of the step behaviour of certain subclasses of Petri nets with inhibitor arcs

Q-Automata: Modelling the Resource Usage of Concurrent Components

AbstractQ–automata are introduced to model quality aspects of component-based software. We propose Q-algebras as a general framework that allows us to combine and choose between quality values. Such values are added to the transitions of automata, which represent components or channels. These automata can be composed by a product construction yielding a more complex Q-automaton labelled with the combined costs of its components. Thus we establish compositionality of quality of service based on an algebra of quality attributes associated with processes represented by automata