Modeling multicasting in communication spaces by reconfigurable high-level Petri nets

Conventional modeling techniques for communication-based systems like Petri nets or UML are restricted to model communication based on a static, immutable network topology. In our research project "Formal modeling and analysis of flexible processes in mobile ad-hoc networks", we have proposed an appropriate integration of Petri nets and Petri net transformation rules, based on graph transformation, leading to a visual formal modeling technique, called reconfigurable Petri nets. In this paper, we extend this previous work on reconfigurable Petri nets on the one hand by marking-changing Petri net transformations, and on the other hand by a technique parallelizing the application of net transformation rules at several matches at once. Both extensions together allow a flexible modeling of communication concepts in communication spaces, like e.g. multicasting, where one actor transmits contents to a group of selected actors. We apply our extended technique to model multicasting group communication in the Internet telephone system Skype.