Formalisation of the Behavior of Actors by Colored Petri Nets and Some Applications

In this paper we present a formalisation of actors by colored Petri nets. In order to do that, we give a structural description of an actor program which makes it easy to obtain a colored Petri net with the corresponding behavior. We give a sketch of the proof that the derived colored Petri net reflects the behavior of the corresponding actor program. We show how this formalisation allows a translation of dynamic system into static one which has some applications. Finally we discuss some other possibilities for deriving a colored Petri net, and we put this formalisation in perspective with other works.

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