Starts with a brief review of the history and the application areas considered in the literature. The author then proceeds with introductory modeling examples, behavioral and structural properties, three methods of analysis, subclasses of Petri nets and their analysis. In particular, one section is devoted to marked graphs, the concurrent system model most amenable to analysis. Introductory discussions on stochastic nets with their application to performance modeling, and on high-level nets with their application to logic programming, are provided. Also included are recent results on reachability criteria. Suggestions are provided for further reading on many subject areas of Petri nets. >

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Petri nets: Properties, analysis and applications

How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

What do a seventeenth-century mortality table (whose causes of death include "fainted in a bath," "frighted," and "itch"); the identification of South Africans during apartheid as European, Asian, colored, or black; and the separation of machine- from hand-washables have in common? All are examples of classification -- the scaffolding of information infrastructures. In Sorting Things Out, Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. The authors emphasize the role of invisibility in the process by which classification orders human interaction. They examine how categories are made and kept invisible, and how people can change this invisibility when necessary. They also explore systems of classification as part of the built information environment. Much as an urban historian would review highway permits and zoning decisions to tell a city's story, the authors review archives of classification design to understand how decisions have been made. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.

https://www.reciis.icict.fiocruz.br/index.php/reciis/article/download/794/1436

Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Consequences

Groupware reflects a change in emphasis from using the computer to solve problems to using the computer to facilitate human interaction. This article describes categories and examples of groupware and discusses some underlying research and development issues. GROVE, a novel group editor, is explained in some detail as a salient groupware example

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Groupware: some issues and experiences

This article asks methodological questions about studying infrastructure with some of the tools and perspectives of ethnography. Infrastructure is both relational and ecological—it means different ...

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The Ethnography of Infrastructure

The paper outlines an approach to CSCW systems design based on the concept of ‘coordination mechanisms.’ The concept of coordination mechanisms has been developed as a generalization of phenomena described in empirical investigations of the use of artifacts for the purpose of coordinating cooperative activities in different work domains. On the basis of the evidence of this corpus of empirical studies, the paper outlines a theory of the use of artifacts for coordination purposes in cooperative work settings, derives a set of general requirements for computational coordination mechanisms, and sketches the architecture of Ariadne, a CSCW infrastructure for constructing and running such malleable and linkable computational coordination mechanisms.

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Coordination mechanisms: towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design

This paper surveys various notions of equivalence for concurrent systems in the framework of Elementary Net Systems, a fundamental class in the family of Petri Net models. Two types of equivalences are considered: equivalences based on observations of actions defined in the framework of interleaving, step and partial order semantics; and equivalences based on state spaces and state observability.

A survey of equivalence notions for net based systems

The paper discusses the role of redundancy in hospital ward work on the basis of a field study that focuses on the use of paper artifacts supporting healthcare and its coordination. On the basis of literature and direct observations, we identified different kinds of redundancy, i.e. redundancy of effort, functions and data. Hence, we analyzed how these different forms of redundancy may affect each other and the coordination inside hospital wards. Redundancy plays a positive or negative role depending on various circumstances. This twofold nature defines different requirements for a technology to support healthcare and ward work by preserving practices linked to paper-based artifacts and by unobtrusively augmenting them with computational capabilities.

When once is not enough: the role of redundancy in a hospital ward setting

The paper discusses the notion of awareness from the point of view of the design of a supportive technology This perspective requires a deeper understanding of the ways and means people adopt to deal with awareness information as well as considering the integration of awareness tools with tools supporting other forms of coordination First, we suggest to consider two types of awareness: by-product awareness that is generated in the course of the activities people must do in order to accomplish their cooperative tasks; and add-on awareness that is the outcome of an additional activity, which is a neat cost for the cooperating actors in relation to what they must do and is discretional in that it depends on actors' evaluation of the contingent situation Secondly, we propose a reaction-diffusion metaphor to describe the awareness phenomenology and to take into account the two above-mentioned types of awareness integration The model of awareness derived from the metaphor makes visible and accessible by different types of users a set of elemental primitives whose flexible composition allows them to construct the awareness mechanisms they dynamically need These primitives are incorporated in a software module that can be used in combination with coordinative applications for sake of promoting awareness information The main architecture of the module is presented together with its interoperability with the target application; moreover, a simple example illustrates how the incorporated primitives can be used to build awareness mechanisms

Integrating Awareness in CooperativeApplications through the Reaction-DiffusionMetaphor

CSCW at large seems to be pursuing two diverging strategies: on one hand a strategy aiming at coordination technologies that reduce the complexity of coordinating cooperative activities by regulating the coordinative interactions, and on the other hand a strategy that aims at radically flexible means of interaction which do not regulate interaction but rather leave it to the users to cope with the complexity of coordinating their activities. As both strategies reflect genuine requirements, we need to address the issue of how the gap can be bridged, that is, how the two strategies can be integrated conceptually. In addressing this problem, the paper discusses two general modalities of articulation work — ad hoc alignment and improvisation on the basis of mutual awareness versus coordination in terms of a predefined flow of work — and argues that these modalities are seamlessly meshed and blended in the course of real world cooperative activities. On the basis of this discussion the paper outlines an approach which may help CSCW research to bridge this gap.

Carla Simone

Papers

Coordination mechanisms: towards a conceptual foundation of CSCW systems design

A survey of equivalence notions for net based systems

When once is not enough: the role of redundancy in a hospital ward setting

Integrating Awareness in CooperativeApplications through the Reaction-DiffusionMetaphor

Mind the gap! Towards a unified view of CSCW