In: Fundamenta Informaticae, Vol. 43, No. 1-4, pages 195-214. 2000.
Abstract: Nested Petri nets are a formalism for modeling hierarchical multi-agent systems. Tokens in nested Petri nets are elements that are themselves represented by nets. The decidability of some problems which are crucial for verification show that, in spite of their ``un-flat'' structure, nested Petri nets maintain significant properties of ordinary Petri nets. A comparison with some other Petri net models is given. The formalism allows generalization to a recursive case, when a nested Petri net can generate a copy of itself as an element. Two simple examples illustrate the approach.
Keywords: decidability problems, hierarchical systems, multi-agent distributed systems, nested Petri nets.