Petri net controlled grammars

Résumé

Different types of regulated grammars have been introduced in order to supplement shortcomings of context-free grammars in applications preserving their elegant mathematical properties. However, the rapid developments in present day industry, biology, and other areas challenge to deal with various tasks which need suitable tools for their modelling and investigation. We propose Petri net controlled grammars as models for representing and analyzing of metabolic pathways in living cells where Petri nets are responsible for the structure and communication of the pathways, and grammars represent biochemical processes. On the other hand, the control by Petri nets has also theoretical interest: it extends possibilities to introduce and investigate concurrent control mechanisms in formal language theory. The thesis introduces various variants of Petri net controlled grammars using different types of Petri nets and investigates their mathematical properties such as computational power and closure properties.