Axioms for contextual net processes

Abstract

In the classical theory of Petri nets, a process is an operational description of the behaviour of a net, which takes into account the causal links between transitions in a sequence of firing steps. In the categorical framework developed in [19, 11], processes of a P/T net are modeled as arrows of a suitable monoidal category: In this paper we lay the basis of a similar characterization for contextual P/T nets, that is, P/T nets extended with read arcs, which allows a transition to check for the presence of a token in a place, without consuming it.