Stepwise development of correct agents: a behavioural approach based on colored Petri nets

The emergence of multi-agents systems in distributed artificial intelligence (DAI) is concerned with coordinating intelligent behaviour among a collection of autonomous intelligent agents. Methodologically speaking, the conception of multi-agents systems can be viewed as a specialization of object-oriented paradigm. The use of Petri nets permits a concise and adequate way to formalize complex parallel or distributed systems allowing very subtle formal validation. Hence, the merging of agent´s concept, object paradigm and Petri nets is a powerful way to model, specify and analyse complex distributed or parallel systems and applications. This is the aim of the paper which describes an Agent Formalism using an object-oriented approach based on High Level Petri Nets (HLPNs)