Bibliography

Modelling the Structure and Behaviour of Petri Net Agents

Michael Köhler, Daniel Moldt, and Heiko Rölke.
Modelling the structure and behaviour of Petri net agents.
In J.M. Colom and M. Koutny, editors, Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets 2001, volume 2075 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 224-241. Springer-Verlag, 2001.  [link]

Abstract: This work proposes a way to model the structure and behaviour of agents in terms of executable coloured Petri net protocols. Structure and behaviour are not all aspects of agent based computing: agents need a world to live in (mostly divided into platforms), they need a general structure (e.g. including a standard interface for communication) and their own special behaviour. Our approach tackles all three parts in terms of Petri nets. This paper skips the topic of agent platforms and handles the agent structure briefly to introduce a key concept of our work: the graphical modelling of the behaviour of autonomous and adaptive agents. A special kind of coloured Petri nets is being used throughout the work: reference nets. Complex agent behaviour is achieved via dynamic composition of simpler sub-protocols, a task that reference nets are especially well suited for. The inherent concurrency of Petri nets is another point that makes it easy to model agents: multiple threads of control are (nearly) automatically implied in Petri nets.

BibTeX entry

@inproceedings{Koehler+01,
  author    =    {K{\"o}hler, Michael and Moldt, Daniel and R{\"o}lke, Heiko},
  title     =    {Modelling the Structure and Behaviour of {Petri} Net Agents},
  booktitle =    {Proceedings of the 22nd Conference on Application and Theory of {Petri} Nets 2001},
  editor    =    {Colom, J.M. and Koutny, M.},
  abstract  =   {This work proposes a way to model the structure and
                 behaviour of agents in terms of executable coloured
                 Petri net protocols. Structure and behaviour are not
                 all aspects of agent based computing: agents need a
                 world to live in (mostly divided into platforms), they
                 need a general structure (e.g. including a standard
                 interface for communication) and their own special
                 behaviour. Our approach tackles all three parts in
                 terms of Petri nets. This paper skips the topic of
                 agent platforms and handles the agent structure briefly
                 to introduce a key concept of our work: the graphical
                 modelling of the behaviour of autonomous and adaptive
                 agents. A special kind of coloured Petri nets is being
                 used throughout the work: reference nets. Complex agent
                 behaviour is achieved via dynamic composition of
                 simpler sub-protocols, a task that reference nets are
                 especially well suited for. The inherent concurrency of
                 Petri nets is another point that makes it easy to model
                 agents: multiple threads of control are (nearly)
                 automatically implied in Petri nets.},
  keywords =    {agent, behaviour, concurrency, modelling, multi agent
                 system, nets within nets, Petri net, reference net,
                 structure;},
  pages     =    {224--241},
  year      =    2001,
  volume    =    {2075},
  series    =    LNCS,
  publisher =    Springer,
  url = {{http://www.springerlink.com/link.asp?id=j4kbf32af81bba75}}
}

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