Behavioral modeling for mobile agent systems using Petri nets

This work presents a formal Petri net-based approach to behaviour modeling for mobile agent systems. Generic agent templates, formalized in Petri net semantics, are proposed to model the components of a distributed mobile agent system. A generic agent template is conceptualized as an entity consisting of a set of actions, a set of rules which govern the agent communications and an event that captures the agent migration. The communication rules determine the Petri net structures which act as connectors in the proposed approach. The behaviour of the mobile agent is linked to both architectural and structural specifications based on system requirements. After providing certain formal definitions we present a theoretical formal model for designing and describing the behaviour of mobile agent systems for distributed asynchronous applications. It supports formal reasoning based on Petri nets.