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]
Abrégé: 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.[link]
@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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