Negotiations and Petri nets

Abstract

Negotiations have recently been introduced as a model of concurrency with multi-party negotiation atoms as primitive. This paper studies the relation between negotiations and Petri nets. In particular, we show that each negotiation can be translated into a 1-safe labelled Petri net with equivalent behaviour. In the general case, this Petri net is exponentially larger than the negotiation. For deterministic negotiations, however, the corresponding Petri has linear size compared to the negotiation, and it enjoys the free-choice property. We show that for this class the negotiation is sound if and only if the corresponding Petri net is sound. Finally, we have a look at the converse direction: given a Petri net, can we find a corresponding negotiation?.