Reversing place transition nets

Abstract

Petri nets are a well-known model of concurrency and provide an ideal setting for the study of fundamental aspects in concurrent systems. Despite their simplicity, they still lack a satisfactory causally reversible semantics. We develop such semantics for Place/Transitions Petri nets (P/T nets) based on two observations. Firstly, a net that explicitly expresses causality and conflict among events, for example an occurrence net, can be straightforwardly reversed by adding a reverse transition for each of its forward transitions. Secondly, given a P/T net the standard unfolding construction associates with it an occurrence net that preserves all of its computation. Consequently, the reversible semantics of a P/T net can be obtained as the reversible semantics of its unfolding. We show that such reversible behaviour can be expressed as a finite net whose tokens are coloured by causal histories. Colours in our encoding resemble the causal memories that are typical in reversible process calculi.Fil: Melgratti, Hernan Claudio. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Oficina de Coordinación Administrativa Ciudad Universitaria. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación. Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Exactas y Naturales. Instituto de Investigación en Ciencias de la Computación; ArgentinaFil: Mezzina, Claudio Antares. Università Degli Studi Di Urbino Carlo Bo; ItaliaFil: Ulidowski, And Irek. University of Leicester; Reino Unid