Consistency Management in Runtime Evolving Concurrent Information Systems: A Co-nets-Based Approach

Abstract

For adequately specifying and rapid-prototyping concurrent information systems, we proposed in [AS99] a new form of object oriented (OO) Petri nets. Referred to as Co-nets, this approach allows in particular to conceive such systems as complex autonomous yet cooperating components. Moreover, for coping with intrinsic dynamic evolution in such systems, we have straightforwardly extended this proposal by introducing notions of meta-places, non-instantiated transitions and a two-step evaluated inference rule [Aou00].

The purpose of this paper is to tackle with another crucial dimension characterizing real-world information systems, namely static and dynamic integrity constraints. For this aim, we propose to associate with each component a ‘constraints’ class. To enforce such constraints, we propose an appropriate ‘synchronization’ inference rule that semantically relates ‘constraints’ transitions with intrinsically dependent ones in the associated component. For a more flexible consistency management we enrich this first proposal by an adequate meta-level, where constraints may be dynamically created, modified or deleted. Finally, we show how this proposal covers a large number of constraint subclasses, including life-cycle based constraints and constraints based on complex derived information as view classes.