Modelling actor programs using Predicate/Transition nets

Author

Coscas, Patrick ; Fouquier, Gilles ; Lanusse, Agnes

Author_Institution

Commissariat a l´´Engie Atomique, Gif sur Yvette, France

fYear

1995

fDate

25-27 Jan 1995

Firstpage

194

Lastpage

200

Abstract

The actor model is a model of concurrent computation which is powerful enough to represent all the operations needed to exploit parallel and distributed machines. In this paper, we propose to model actor programs with Predicate/Transition nets. Predicate/Transition nets are high-level Petri nets with data structures instead of tokens and predicates associated with transitions. This formalism permits to express the operational semantics of an actor program in its entirety: a translation scheme from the actor language PRAL-M to the Predicate/Transition nets language PTN is described. This formalism which has both a textual and a graphical representation, is also useful for debugging and visualizing actor programs. Using this scheme, a prototype has been implemented to translate actor programs into Predicate/Transition nets and to debug them by simulating their execution in a step by step mode

Keywords

Petri nets; data structures; parallel machines; parallel programming; PRAL-M; PTN; Predicate/Transition nets; actor programs; concurrent computation; data structures; debugging; formalism; high-level Petri nets; translation scheme; visualizing; Computational modeling; Concurrent computing; Data structures; Debugging; Distributed computing; Object oriented modeling; Petri nets; Postal services; Virtual prototyping; Visualization;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Parallel and Distributed Processing, 1995. Proceedings. Euromicro Workshop on

Conference_Location

San Remo

Print_ISBN

0-8186-7031-2

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/EMPDP.1995.389129

Filename

389129