Modelling actor programs using Predicate/Transition nets

Abstract

The actor model is a model of concurrent computation which is powerful enough to represent all the operations needed to exploit parallel and distributed machines. In this paper, we propose to model actor programs with Predicate/Transition nets. Predicate/Transition nets are high-level Petri nets with data structures instead of tokens and predicates associated with transitions. This formalism permits to express the operational semantics of an actor program in its entirety: a translation scheme from the actor language PRAL-M to the Predicate/Transition nets language PTN is described. This formalism which has both a textual and a graphical representation, is also useful for debugging and visualizing actor programs. Using this scheme, a prototype has been implemented to translate actor programs into Predicate/Transition nets and to debug them by simulating their execution in a step by step mode.<>