An agent-based Petri net model with application to seller/buyer design in electronic commerce

Agents are becoming one of the most important topics in distributed and autonomous decentralized systems (ADS), and there are increasing attempts to use agent technologies to develop software systems in electronic commerce. Such systems are complex and there is a pressing need for system modeling techniques to support reliable, maintainable and extensible design. G-Nets are a type of Petri net defined to support modeling of a system as a set of independent and loosely-coupled modules. The authors first introduce an extension of G-Net, agent based G-Net, as a generic model for agent design. Then new communication mechanisms are introduced to support asynchronous message passing among agents. To illustrate that our formal modeling technique is effective for agent modeling in electronic commerce, a price-negotiation protocol example between buyers and sellers is provided. Finally, by analyzing an ordinary Petri net reduced from our agent based G-Net models, we conclude that our agent based G-Net models are L3-live, concurrent and effective for agent communications.