In: Fundamenta Informaticae, Vol. 38, No. 3, pages 223-255. 1999.
Abstract: In the formal treatment of concurrent computing systems, causality and weak causality can be used to provide abstract specifications of the temporal `earlier than' and `not later than' orderings. This paper considers relational structures comprising causality and weak causality, called stratified order structures, which can be used to provide a non-sequential semantics of Petri nets with inhibitor arcs. It is shown that this approach can be extended to nets augmented with priority specifications. In particular, it is shown how to derive stratified order structures for such nets by generalizing the standard construction of causal partial orders based on occurrence nets.
Keywords: Petri nets with priorities, causality relation, occurrence nets, stratified order structures, weak causality relation.