OPENET: Ontology-based engine for high-level Petri nets

In this paper, OPENET, an engine for the execution of high-level Petri nets (HLPNs) is presented. OPENET is based on an ontology that represents the knowledge of the ISO/IEC 15909-1 standard and, respectively, describes semantically and declaratively both the static structure and the dynamic behavior of HLPNs. Thus the ontology is composed of (i) a taxonomy that describes the main components of a net, capturing the vocabulary and semantics specified in the standard; and (ii) a set of axioms and rules that constrain how the instances of the taxonomy are created, restricting the range and domain of the relations, and the values of the attributes. These axioms guarantee that a HLPN is correctly constructed, and restrict how it should be executed; and (iii) a set of rules which contain the knowledge needed to execute HLPNs and thus infer new instances of the concepts that describe the dynamic model of the HLPN. The OPENET engine has been implemented in F-Logic with the FLORA-2 reasoner, and is being used in several domains: the execution of courses in E-learning, the modeling and execution of workflows in Industry, and the execution of web service choreographies. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.