Web services-- Web-accessible programs and devices – are a key application area for the Semantic Web. With the proliferation of Web services and the evolution towards the Semantic Web comes the opportunity to automate various Web services tasks. Our objective is to enable markup and automated reasoning technology to describe, simulate, compose, test, and verify compositions of Web services. We take as our starting point the DAML-S DAML+OIL ontology for describing the capabilities of Web services. We define the semantics for a relevant subset of DAML-S in terms of a first-order logical language. With the semantics in hand, we encode our service descriptions in a Petri Net formalism and provide decision procedures for Web service simulation, verification and composition. We also provide an analysis of the complexity of these tasks under different restrictions to the DAML-S composite services we can describe. Finally, we present an implementation of our analysis techniques. This implementation takes as input a DAML-S description of a Web service, automatically generates a Petri Net and performs the desired analysis. Such a tool has broad applicability both as a back end to existing manual Web service composition tools, and as a stand-alone tool for Web service developers.

The theme of this paper is profunctors, and their centrality and ubiquity in understanding concurrent computation. Profunctors (a.k.a. distributors, or bimodules) are a generalisation of relations to categories. Here they are first presented and motivated via spans of event structures, and the semantics of nondeterministic dataflow. Profunctors are shown to play a key role in relating models for concurrency and to support an interpretation as higher-order processes (where input and output may be processes). Two recent directions of research are described. One is concerned with a language and computational interpretation for profunctors. This addresses the duality between input and output in profunctors. The other is to investigate general spans of event structures (the spans can be viewed as special profunctors) to give causal semantics to higher-order processes. For this it is useful to generalise event structures to allow events which “persist.”

State explosion is the primary obstacle to practical application of reachability analysis techniques for concurrent systems. State explosion can be substantially controlled by using process algebra to achieve compositional (divide-and-conquer) analysis. A prototype tool incorporating process algebra is described. The promise and problems of the approach are illustrated by applying the tool to an example that incorporates the alternating bit protocol as a module.

The events of a security protocol and their causal dependency can play an important role in the analysis of security properties. This insight underlies both strand spaces and the inductive method. But neither of these approaches builds up the events of a protocol in a compositional way, so that there is an informal spring from the protocol to its model. By broadening the models to certain kinds of Petri nets, a restricted form of contextual nets, a compositional eventbased semantics is given to an economical, but expressive, language for describing security protocols; so the events and dependency of a wide range of protocols are determined once and for all. The net semantics is formally related to a transition semantics, strand spaces and inductive rules, as well as trace languages and event structures, so unifying a range of approaches, as well as providing conditions under which particular, more limited, models are adequate for the analysis of protocols. The net semantics allows the derivation of general properties and proof principles which are demonstrated in establishing an authentication property, following a diagrammatic style of proof.

This paper presents a novel method to derive a Petri net from any specification model that can be mapped into a state-based representation with arcs labeled with symbols from an alphabet of events (a Transition System, TS). The method is based on the theory of regions for Elementary Transition Systems (ETS). Previous work has shown that for any ETS there exists a Petri net with minimum transition count (one transition for each label) with a reachability graph isomorphic to the original Transition System. The method makes use of the following three mechanisms, providing a framework for synthesis of safe Petri nets from arbitrary TSs. Firstly, the requirement of isomorphism is relaxed to a "more behavioural" form of equivalence, bisimulation of TSs, thus extending the class of synthesizable TSs to a new class called Excitation-Closed Transition Systems(ECTS). Secondly, previous work required an oracle (usually the designer) to identify sets of events labeling the TS that were mapped to...

Labelled transition systems are a simple yet powerful formalism for describing the operational behaviour of computing systems. They can be extended to model concurrency faithfully by permitting transitions between states to be labelled by a collection of actions, denoting a concurrent step. Petri nets (or Place/Transition nets) give rise to such step transition systems in a natural way -- the marking diagram of a Petri net is the canonical transition system associated with it. In this paper, we characterize the class of PN-transition systems, which are precisely those step transition systems generated by Petri nets. We express the correspondence between PN-transition systems and Petri nets in terms of an adjunction between a category of PN-transition systems and a category of Petri nets in which the associated morphisms are behaviour-preserving in a strong and natural sense.

We study the complexity of several standard problems for 1-safe Petri nets and some of its subclasses. We prove that reachability, liveness, and deadlock are all PSPACE-complete for 1-safe nets. We also prove that deadlock is NP-complete for free-choice nets and for 1-safe free-choice nets. Finally, we prove that for arbitrary Petri nets, deadlock is equivalent to reachability and liveness. This paper is to be presented at FST&TCS 13, Foundations of Software Technology & Theoretical Computer Science, to be held 1517 December 1993, in Bombay, India. A version of the paper with most proofs omitted is to appear in the proceedings. 1 Introduction Petri nets are one of the oldest and most studied formalisms for the investigation of concurrency [33]. Shortly after the birth of complexity theory, Jones, Landweber, and Lien studied in their classical paper [24] the complexity of several fundamental problems for Place/Transition nets (called in [24] just Petri nets). Some years later, Howell,...

Abstract. We study causality in the ß-calculus. Our notion of causality combines the dependencies given by the syntactic structure of processes with those originated by passing names. It turns out that two transitions not causally related may although occur in a fixed ordering in any computation, i.e., ß-calculus may express implicitly a priority between actions. Our causality relation still induces the same partial order of transitions for all the computations that are obtained by shuffling transitions that are concurrent (= related neither by causality nor by priority). The presentation takes advantage from a parametric definition of process behaviour that highlights the essence of the topic. All the results on bisimulation based equivalences, congruences, axiomatizations and logics are taken (almost) for free from the interleaving theory. 1 Introduction The study of the behaviour of a distributed system may benefit from knowledge on the causal relation between its events. For examp...

. In the last few years, the semantics of Petri nets has been investigated in several di#erent ways. Apart from the classical "token game," one can model the behaviour of Petri nets via non-sequential processes, via unfolding constructions, which provide formal relationships between nets and domains, and via algebraic models, which view Petri nets as essentially algebraic theories whose models are monoidal categories. In this paper we show that these three points of view can be reconciled. In our formal development a relevant role is played by DecOcc, a category of occurrence nets appropriately decorated to take into account the history of tokens. The structure of decorated occurrence nets at the same time provides natural unfoldings for Place/Transition (PT) nets and suggests a new notion of processes, the decorated processes, which induce on Petri nets the same semantics as that of unfolding. In addition, we prove that the decorated processes of a net can be axiomatized as the arrows...

Petri Place/Transition (PT) nets are one of the most widely used models of concurrency. However, they still lack, in our view, a satisfactory semantics: on the one hand the “token game ” is too intensional, even in its more abstract interpretations in term of nonsequential processes and monoidal categories; on the other hand, Winskel’s basic unfolding construction, which provides a coreflection between nets and finitary prime algebraic domains, works only for safe nets. In this paper we extend Winskel’s result to PT nets. We start with a rather general category PTNets of PT nets, we introduce a category DecOcc of decorated (nondeterministic) occurrence nets and we define adjunctions between PTNets and DecOcc and between DecOcc and Occ, the category of occurrence nets. The role of DecOcc is to provide natural unfoldings for PT nets, i.e. acyclic safe nets where a notion of family is used for relating multiple instances of the same place. The unfolding functor from PTNets to Occ reduces to Winskel’s when restricted to safe nets, while the standard coreflection between Occ and Dom, the category of finitary prime algebraic domains, when composed with the unfolding functor above, determines a chain of adjunctions between PTNets and Dom.