For many years, Petri nets have been used for modeling the behavior of various types of concurrent systems. While these net models are especially well suited to capture the behavior of concurrent systems, it is still the case that net models do not easily capture some important structural aspects of a system, such as modularity. In terms of software systems for distributed applications, the object-oriented paradigm has become a standard for defining modularity and reuse of software. Thus, an evolving direction in Petri net technology is the blending of net features with object-oriented capability. This paper discusses one such approach for state-based object systems.
A. Newman, Sol M. Shatz, X. Xie