An agent net approach to autonomous distributed systems

When we design a large scale system, it will be more effective to consider the system as a set of plural objects, and to design each object and relations among objects. This concept is well known for object-oriented methodologies. To consider the control of such system, it will be hard to apply the traditional centralized control because of the deficiencies in robustness, flexibility, and set-up speed of the control. To overcome this problem it is necessary to implement an autonomous distributed system. In this system, each object acts on its own judgment in order to accomplish the purpose of the whole system. Petri nets are well known for an efficient mathematical model for concurrent systems. Thus an integration of the concept of Petri nets and object-oriented methodologies will bring us a good model to describe autonomous distributed systems. In this paper, we discuss a multi-agent net model for autonomous distributed systems, which is an integration of the concept of Petri nets and object oriented modeling techniques