In: Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC'2000), 8-11 October 2000, Nashville, TN, Vol. 4, pages 3009-3014. 2000.
Abstract: Agent technology is widely recognized as a new paradigm for the design of concurrent software. The aim of this paper is to give a mathematical foundation for the design and the analysis of multi-agent systems by means of a Petri net based model. The proposed model is based on place/transition nets, one of the simplest classes of Petri nets. The main difference is that each token, representing an agent, is also a place/transition net. The proposed approach is sufficiently simple for the mathematical analysis, but has enough modeling power to represent concurrent software systems.
Keywords: Petri nets, concurrent software, multi-agent systems.