In: Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC'2000), 8-11 October 2000, Nashville, TN, Vol. 4, pages 3128-3133. 2000.
Abstract: G-nets are a type of Petri nets defined to support modeling of systems as a set of independent and loosely-coupled modules. The modular features of G-nets provide support for incremental design and successive modifications. However, the G-net formalism is not fully object-oriented due to a lack of support for inheritance. This paper introduces extensions to G-nets to support explicit modeling of inheritance. Bounded-buffer examples are used, which are defined as subclasses of an unbounded buffer, to illustrate the expressive power of the extended G-net models. Various forms of inheritance are formalized and discussed in the context of concurrent object-oriented design. In addition, the inheritance anomaly problem is examined and discussed.
Keywords: G-nets, Petri nets, incremental design, inheritance, inheritance anomaly, object-oriented design.