Communication Dualism in Distributed Systems with Petri Net Interpretation

Abstract: In the paper notion of communication dualism id formalized and explained in Petri net interpretation. We consider communication dualism a basic property of communication in distributed systems. The formalization is done in the Integrated Model of Distributed Systems (IMDS) where synchronous communication, as well as asynchronous message-passing and variable-sharing are modeled in a common framework. In the light of this property, communication in distributed systems can be seen as a two-dimensional phenomenon with passing being its spatial dimension and sharing its temporal dimension. Any distributed system can be modeled as a composition of message-passes asynchronous processes or as a composition of variable-sharing asynchronous processes. A method of automatic process extraction in Petri net interpretation of IMDS is presented.