Abstract

The chief purpose of this paper is to appraise the feasibility of Girard's linear logic as a specification language for parallel processes. To this end we propose an interpretation of linear logic in Petri nets, with respect to which we investigate the expressive power of the logic. 1 Introduction Girard's linear logic has sparked off a great deal of interest in how it might be useful in the theory of parallelism, not least because of Girard's initial claims for it [Gir87]. Linear logic has been described as a "resource conscious" logic by Mart'i-Oliet and Meseguer [MOM89]; in its proofs occurrences of propositions cannot be used more than once or disappear unless they are explicitly created or used up by the rules of inference. People were not long in spotting a relationship with Petri nets where there are similar ideas. Places in a Petri net hold to certain nonnegative multiplicities forming a multiset of places, traditionally called a marking; as transitions occur, multipliciti...

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