Rüdiger Valk (Universität Hamburg):
Comparing Reference and Value Semantics for Object Petri Nets
The distinction between local and distributed information processing is one of the characteristics of communication based systems.
Reference Nets as well as Object Nets belong to a class of Petri nets allowing for a two level way of modelling, by giving tokens of a Petri net the structure of a Petri net, again. They differ, however, in the types of reference to these token objects. While Object Nets allow for distributed data management, Reference Nets are restricted to the reference to an unique token object. In analogy to programming language constructs, this is denoted by reference and value semantics, respectively.
In this contribution the problem is studied whether distributed and non-distributed behaviour differs or can be simulated by each other. By discussing under which conditions the two semantics coincide a contribution to the fundamentals of communication based systems is obtained.
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