Principles of high-level net theory

Abstract

The paper gives an introduction to fundamentals and recent trends in the theory of high-level nets. High-level nets are first formally derived from low-level nets by means of a quotient construction. Based on a linear-algebraic representations, we develop an invariant calculus that essentially corresponds to the algebraic core of the well-known coloured nets. We demonstrate that the modelling power of high-level nets stems from the use of expressive symbolic annotation languages, where as a typical model we consider predicate-transition nets, both concrete models and net-schemes. As examples of specific high-level analysis-tools we discuss symbolic place-invariants and reachability-trees.