Extending Petri Nets for Specifying Man-Machine Dialogues

Abstract The requirements of man-machine dialogue-specification techniques are examined. Petri nets are identified as possible candidates for a modelling technique for dialogues on the basis of their applicability to concurrent, asynchronous systems. Labelled Petri nets are extended to nested Petri nets, allowing transitions to invoke subnets. It is shown that this extension allows nested Petri nets to generate at least the set of context-free languages. Further extensions are made to simplify the modelling of input and output in the user interface, resulting in input-output nets. Transitions labelled by error conditions and meta functions on nets are introduced to increase the usability of the model. Finally, the use of the model is demonstrated by modelling a small hypothetical command language.

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