Using agents for simulating and implementing Petri nets

The paper presents a software architecture for simulating and implementing Petri nets. It is based on object-oriented techniques and autonomous agents. Object-orientation enables the adaptation and extension of the software architecture with new or alternatively defined features. Agents allow one to model a net as a set of autonomous, cooperating entities. The result is a flexible and extendible framework of reusable components for efficiently implementing a large family of Petri net classes. The execution can be performed on a mono-processor, a parallel system or a distributed system. This is the result of using the XENOOPS execution environments for parallel applications.