Replicated ambient Petri nets

Abstract

Recently we have introduced Ambient Petri nets, as a multilevel extension of the Elementary Object Systems, that can be used to model the concept of nested ambients from the Ambient Calculus. Both mobile computing and mobile computation are supported by that calculus, and then by means of our Ambient Petri nets we get a way to introduce in the world of Petri nets these important features of nowadays computing. Nevertheless, our basic proposal does not yet provide the suitable background for the modeling of replication, one of the basic operators from the original calculus, by means of which infinite processes are introduced and treated in a very simple way. In this paper we enrich our framework by introducing that operator. We obtain a simple and nice model in which the basic nets are still static and finite, since the dynamics of the systems can be covered by the adequate notion of marking, where all the copies generated by the application of the replication operator will live together, without interfering in an inadequate way.