Structuration of large scale Petri nets: an association with higher level formalisms for the design of multi-agent systems

Our approach recommends using formal methods to verify the significant properties of multi-agent systems. This paper introduces our approach for the design and specification process, the formal description techniques, the generation of executable distributed prototypes of distributed cooperative environments. We focus our proposal on the cooperative part of the agents and not on the cognitive ones. Our purpose is to transform the high-level specification of these kinds of systems into the uniform high level Petri net formalism while retaining the original system semantics. One advantage is that agents as well as Petri nets are independent from the underlying target architecture for which prototyping is performed.