Compositional semantics for open Petri nets
based on deterministic processes

In order to model the behaviour of open concurrent systems by means of Petri nets, we introduce open Petri nets, a generalization of the ordinary model where some places, designated as open, represent an interface of the system towards the environment. Besides generalizing the token game to reflect this extension, we define a truly concurrent semantics for open nets by extending the Goltz-Reisig process semantics of Petri nets.

We introduce a composition operation over open nets, characterized as a pushout in the corresponding category, suitable to model both interaction through open places and synchronization of transitions. The deterministic process semantics is shown to be compositional with respect to such composition operation. If a net N3 results as the composition of two nets N1 and N2, having a common subnet N0, then any two deterministic processes of N1 and N2 which ``agree'' on the common part, can be ``amalgamated'' to produce a deterministic process of N3. Vice versa, any deterministic process of N3 can be decomposed into processes of the component nets. The amalgamation and decomposition operations are shown to be inverse to each other, leading to a bijective correspondence between the deterministic processes of N3 and pair of deterministic processes of N1 and N2 which agree on the common subnet N0. Technically, our result is similar to the amalgamation theorem for data-types in the framework of algebraic specification.

A possible application field of the proposed constructions and results is the modeling of interorganizational workflows, recently studied in the literature. This is illustrated by a running example.