Modeling and Analysis of Three Properties of Mobile Interactive Systems Based on Variable Petri Nets

In mobile interactive systems, there exist several components that can move and interact with each other. The current methods fail to give a comprehensive description of their properties and have inadequate modeling and analysis capacity for them. This paper concludes three system properties called system connectivity, interaction soundness and data validity, and focuses on their modeling and analysis based on Variable Petri Nets (VPNs), which have recently been proposed and are able to describe their dynamic interactions. A VPN-based model including component nets and interaction structure nets is constructed given a mobile interactive system. It depicts its structure and event-driven dynamics. Three properties and their related analysis methods of a VPN-based model are presented. An example is given to demonstrate the proposed concepts and methods. <italic>Note to Practitioners</italic>&#x2014;Due to the mobility and frequent disconnections, the correctness of mobile interaction systems, such as mobile robot systems and mobile payment systems, are often difficult to analyze. This paper introduces three critical properties of systems, called system connectivity, interaction soundness and data validity, and presents a related modeling and analysis method, based on a kind of Petri net called VPN. For a given system, a model including component nets and interaction structure nets is constructed by using VPNs. The component net describes the internal process of each component, while the interaction structure net reflects the dynamic interaction between components. Based on this model, three properties are defined and analyzed. The case study of a practical mobile payment system shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.