A. Oberweis et P. Sander, INFORMATION-SYSTEM BEHAVIOR SPECIFICATION BY HIGH-LEVEL PETRI NETS, ACM transactions on information systems, 14(4), 1996, pp. 380-420
Citations number
38
Categorie Soggetti
Information Science & Library Science","Computer Science Information Systems
The specification of an information system should include a descriptio
n of structural system aspects as well as a description of the system
behavior. In this article, we show how this can be achieved by high-le
vel Petri nets-namely, the so-called NR/T-nets (Nested-Relation/Transi
tion Nets). In NR/T-nets, the structural part is modeled by nested rel
ations, and the behavioral part is modeled by a novel Petri net formal
ism. Each place of a net represents a nested relation scheme, and the
marking of each place is given as a nested relation of the respective
type. Insert and delete operations in a nested relational database (NF
2-database) are expressed by transitions in a net. These operations ma
y operate not only on whole tuples of a given relation, but also on ''
subtuples'' of existing tuples. The arcs of a net are inscribed with s
o-called Filter Tables, which allow (together with an optional logical
expression as transition inscription) conditions to be formulated on
the specified (sub-) tuples. The occurrence rule for NR/T-net transiti
ons is defined by the operations union, intersection, and ''negative''
in lattices of nested relations. The structure of an NR/T-net, togeth
er with the occurrence rule, defines classes of possible information s
ystem procedures, i.e., sequences of (possibly concurrent) operations
in an information system.