Modeling and generating context-aware agent-based applications with amended colored Petri nets

Context-awareness is become more crucial in mobile distributed computing systems. However, sophisticated modeling methods to analyze context-aware systems are still very. few. Among those, the Colored Petri Net (CPN) is promising because it is proven to be useful for modeling system dynamics and concurrency control in more efficient ways. However, to support managing multiple configurations of components of context-aware applications, some features need to be added to specialize the CPNs. To address these challenges, our research has two idea: (a) to decompose a system into several meaningful subsystems, each of-which we will call a pattern, and (b) to separate context from the patterns to realize context-pattern independence. Hence, we propose a modeling methodology to represent and analyze a context-aware agent-based system, which tends to be highly complex. We introduce CPNs as a method of capturing the dynamics of this contextual change. We define CPNs and a way to apply them in context-aware agent-based systems. We also describe a prototype system that we have developed called CPN Generator; which translates CPN specification into Java programs. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.