In: Lectures on Concurrency and Petri Nets: Advances in Petri Nets, pages 291-327. Volume 3098 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Jörg Desel, Wolfgang Reisig, Grzegorz Rozenberg (Eds.) --- Springer-Verlag, June 2004.
Abstract: As web applications become more and more complex, primitives for handling interaction patterns among independent components become essential. In fact, distributed applications require new forms of transactions for orchestrating the progress of their negotiations and agreements. Still we lack foundational models that accurately explain the crucial aspects of the problem. In this work we explore how to model transactions in coloured, reconfigurable and dynamic nets, (i.e., high-level/high-order Petri nets that can express mobility and can extend themselves dynamically during their execution). Starting from zero-safe nets -- a well-studied extension of Place/Transition Petri nets with a transactional mechanism based on a distinction between consistent (observable) and transient (hidden) states -- we show how the zero-safe approach can be smoothly applied to a hierarchy of nets of increasing expressiveness.