Bisimilarity and Behaviour-Preserving Reconfigurations of Open Petri Nets

Abstract

We propose a framework for the specification of behaviour-preservingreconfigurations of systems modelled as Petri nets. The framework is based onopen nets, a mild generalisation of ordinary Place/Transition nets suited tomodel open systems which might interact with the surrounding environment andendowed with a colimit-based composition operation. We show that naturalnotions of bisimilarity over open nets are congruences with respect to thecomposition operation. The considered behavioural equivalences differ for thechoice of the observations, which can be single firings or parallel steps.Additionally, we consider weak forms of such equivalences, arising in thepresence of unobservable actions. We also provide an up-to technique forfacilitating bisimilarity proofs. The theory is used to identify suitableclasses of reconfiguration rules (in the double-pushout approach to rewriting)whose application preserves the observational semantics of the net.Comment: To appear in "Logical Methods in Computer Science", 41 page