5 Formal Languages and Concurrent Behaviours 169
is the same whether defined in terms of firing sequences, or step sequences, or
multiset sequences
. Hence, also the state space is the same for the three
semantics. Contact-free EN-systems can be viewed as special PT-systems with
the additional property of being safe, i.e., no reachable marking will ever
assign more than one token to a place
. (Note that in a safe PT-system
there is no auto-concurrency
.) Exactly as for EN-systems we can consider
the state graph of PT , with the markings reachable from M
init
as nodes and
with labelled arcs (M, U, M
) whenever M [UM
. In addition, there are the
sequential state graph of PT and its multiset state graph, both defined in the
obvious way.
The most basic behaviour of a PT-system PT is captured by its language
firseq(PT ) consisting of all firing sequences from its initial marking. Clearly,
firseq(PT ) is a prefix-closed language, and each firing sequence corresponds
to a unique path through the sequential state graph of PT starting from the
initial marking. Since the numbers of tokens per place are not necessarily
bounded, it is possible that the state space of PT is not finite (even though
PT itself is a finite object) and firseq(PT ) not regular. Consider PT1, the first
net in Figure 5.19 with its initial marking as given there. The number of tokens
in the buffer place p4 can be arbitrarily large, but apart from the initial item,
the consumer can never consume more items than added to the buffer by the
producer. Thus, firseq(PT1) ∩{am}
∗
{gu}
∗
= {(am)
k
(gu)
n
| n ≤ k +1}.Conse-
quently, firseq(PT1) is not regular. Next to firseq(PT ),wehavestepseq(PT )
and multisetseq(PT), the step language and the multiset language PT con-
sisting of all step sequences, multiset sequences respectively, from its initial
marking. A PT-system PT such that multisetseq(PT )=stepseq(PT ), i.e.,
it does not exhibit any auto-concurrency at all, is co-safe. Note that safe
PT-systems are necessarily co-safe, but that the converse implication is not
true
.
In contrast to the situation for EN-systems, diamonds in the sequential
state graphs of PT-systems do not imply nor exclude possible concurrent
behaviour and stepseq(PT ) cannot be reconstructed from firseq(PT ). Simi-
larly, since information on auto-concurrency is missing in the step sequence
semantics, multisetseq(PT) cannot, in general, be derived from stepseq(PT ).
In other words, two PT-systems with isomorphic sequential state graphs may
have state graphs which are not isomorphic, and systems with isomorphic
state graphs may have multiset state graphs which are not isomorphic. More-
over, for PT-systems, the concurrency, conflict and causality relations between
transitions are not merely structural, but may change with the current mark-
ing. As an example, consider PT4 in Figure 5.20. This PT-system has exactly
all prefixes of all words which are permutations of the symbols a, b,andc,as
its firing sequences. As step sequences it has in addition {a, b}, {a, c}, {b, c},
{a, b}c, {a, c}b, {b, c}a, a{b, c}, b{a, c},andc{a, b
}. If, however, the initial
marking would have assigned one token instead of two in the uppermost place,
there would have been only firing sequences and no additional step sequences;
and with initially three tokens in the uppermost place also {a, b, c} would