Modeling and inheritance of behaviour in object-oriented systems

One of the main benefits of object orientation is the concept of inheritance which allows for the derivation of new types/classes from existing ones. Within commonly used object oriented languages, inheritance is usually directed to attributes and method signatures, only. Considering languages providing means for the specification of object life cycles, the concept of inheritance needs to be extended to be able to cover not only static but also behavioural aspects. The article introduces a set of requirements for the modeling and inheritance of object behaviour. Based on a short survey of existing work, a new approach is introduced which is suited to be used with a class of object oriented Petri nets.