[erlang-questions] Petri nets

[Judson Lester]

I've been casually working on a project that's something like a Petri net
applied to the software build problem. There's ways in which it's not,
strictly speaking, a Petri net, but I've thought for a while that the
underlying graph processing model might be useful elsewhere:

https://git.lrdesign.com/judson/ergo

On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 10:25 AM Grzegorz Junka <list1@REDACTED> wrote:

> In my view Petri nets somehow share the fate of expert systems. They are
> just theoretical tools that's great to know about but not very practical
> to solve real-life problems. This is because any problem one need to
> solve would need to fit in the domain in which that tool operates.
>
> In case of expert systems it is the inference based on facts, but how do
> you add new facts, validate them, remove obsolete, etc? In real life
> scenarios the knowledge is already somewhere and one only need to write
> the inference on top of it. Trying to squeeze the whole application into
> the tool that solves the specific problem is someone counterintuitive
> (e.g. implementing all IO and adding, validating and removing facts in
> Prolog only because Prolog is great as inference machine).
>
> In my opinion the same can be said about Petri nets. When I have to
> write an application solving a specific problem, trying to solve some of
> its parts using Petri nets may not give me the required benefit because
> of the required shift between different domains.
>
> Having said that, it maybe just a matter of integrating Petri nets into
> the language at the correct level, similarly to how Erlang integrated
> message passing and green processes into the language.
>
> But can you think about a problem that could be better solved by having
> multiple gen_pn representing nodes of concurrent computations in a Petri
> net rather than green Erlang threads communicating with each other using
> message passing?
>
> Grzegorz
>
>
> On 06/07/2016 15:17, Jörgen Brandt wrote:
> > And here the link to the library ...
> >
> > https://github.com/joergen7/gen_pnet
> >
> > On 06.07.2016 17:16, Jörgen Brandt wrote:
> >> Dear all,
> >>
> >> recently I was curious about programming with Petri nets. I have
> >> the impression that concurrent nature of Petri nets would be
> >> extremely useful for many types of applications.
> >>
> >> Also, with the gen_fsm and the gen_statem being part of Erlang's
> >> standard library the idea of implementing application models in
> >> terms of behaviours filling in the missing callback functions
> >> while abstracting away the brittle parts concurrency and
> >> communication would have a strong appeal. Imho, Petri nets can be
> >> defined in exactly the same way.
> >>
> >> This idea has also been discussed in a mailing list entry by Claus
> >> Reinke [1] who happens to have written a paper about implementing
> >> Petri nets in Haskell [2] in which he observes that functional
> >> languages are well suited for implementing Petri nets and points
> >> out Erlang as a potential candidate also with regard to concurrency
> >> aspects.
> >>
> >> In addition, I stumbled over a compelling blog post which
> >> motivates the use of Petri nets for application design in the
> >> context of telecommunication applications [3]. The author goes on
> >> to presents his Petri net programming library in C# and even has
> >> proposed a gen_pn behaviour for Erlang [4].
> >>
> >> However, the aforementioned gen_pn library has not been touched
> >> for six years and the email from Claus Reinke has been sitting in
> >> the Erlang mailing list archives for 13 years (unanswered).
> >>
> >> My question is, in your opinion, is the idea of using Petri nets as
> >> a programming model in Erlang just a bad idea? Or has the right
> >> library just not been conceived to date? Do you use Petri nets to
> >> sketch out an application's behavior but then translate it to a
> >> different model prior to implementation? How can a
> >> telecommunication-focused programming ecosystem have avoided Petri
> >> nets for such a long time while readily absorbing ever more flavors
> >> of state machines?
> >>
> >> That said, I would be very glad to receive your feedback on a
> >> Petri net library I recently came up with. So you have something to
> >> base your criticism on (;
> >>
> >> [1]
> >> http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/2003-November/010704.html
> >>
> >>
> > [2] http://community.haskell.org/~claus/publications/HCPN.html
> >> [3]
> >> https://aabs.wordpress.com/2010/03/10/programming-with-petri-nets/
> >> [4] https://github.com/aabs/gen_pn
> >> _______________________________________________ erlang-questions
> >> mailing list erlang-questions@REDACTED
> >> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
> >>
> > _______________________________________________
> > erlang-questions mailing list
> > erlang-questions@REDACTED
> > http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> erlang-questions mailing list
> erlang-questions@REDACTED
> http://erlang.org/mailman/listinfo/erlang-questions
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://erlang.org/pipermail/erlang-questions/attachments/20160706/9876146a/attachment.htm>