Nets are widely used in the theory of concurrency. One evident reason for that is the convenience of visualizing the communication structure of systems. Nets seem to cover almost any situation which involves "sharing" or communication. For an engineer it could mean sharing of component terminals by connecting them electrically; a mathematician can consider sharing of variables in a system of equations or sharing relations when they are composed. This is a research program into semantics of concurrent systems which are based on the net concept. Hopefully the expected results will provide a reliable basis for design of such systems and reasoning about them. As a byproduct one can expect also more insight into the semantics of nets in other "sharing situations". Fundamental research will be carried out on semantics and proof theory of networks of dataflow and other concurrent processes, emphasizing "causal" semantics to support refinement and atomicity of process behavior. The work will be carried out by Professor Boris A. Trakhtenbrot of Tel Aviv University in collaboration with the Principal Investigator.
