In: Proceedings of Colloquium on Petri Net Technologies for Modelling Communication Based Systems, October 21-22, 1999, pages 169-187. Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, ISST, 1999.
Abstract: The distinction between local and distributed information processing is one of the characteristics of communication based systems. Reference Nets as well as Object Nets belong to a class of Petri nets allowing for a two level way of modeling by giving tokens of a Petri net the structure of a Petri net, again. They differ, however, in the type of reference to these token objects. While Object Nets allow for distributed data management, Reference Nets are restricted to the reference of an unique token object. In analogy to programming language constructs, this is denoted by reference and value semantics, respectively. In this contribution the problem is studied whether distributed and non distributed behavior differs or can be simulated by each other. By discussing under which conditions the two semantics coincide a contribution of the fundamentals of communication based systems is obtained.