COLORED PETRI-NET MODELING OF THE ODP TRADER FOR USE IN RESOURCE DISCOVERY

As high speed networking becomes more widespread and increasingly acce ssible from home, a huge variety of new vendors and services will beco me available to consumers. These services will fall into three main ca tegories: information services, shopping and entertainment. One of the major problems facing an increasingly information-rich society is how to quickly and conveniently locate information which is provided by d ifferent servers throughout a large distributed system. The Reference Model for Open Distributed Processing (RM-ODP) deals with the problem of locating services/resources in a heterogeneous open distributed sys tem through the standardization of a Trading function which is realize d by a Trader. To increase our understanding of a Trader's dynamic beh aviour, a CPN model has been created. The Trader's computational viewp oint has been modelled using a hierarchy of CPNs which allow functiona l blocks to be modelled separately and their inter-relationships defin ed. A discussion of the model and techniques for its analysis are pres ented.