Dynamic change in office automation: modeling and analysis

With the extensions of office boundary and office operational hours, more and more office systems are required to support dynamic change that allows the system to be structurally changed while in continuous operation. Using Petri net as an abstract model, a path property notion that can describe the dynamic aspects statically is proposed in this paper. The path property provides a finite set of linear strings that represent the properties of outcomes produced in an office system. This can overcome the difficulty of articulating and reasoning a dynamically changing system. Two techniques can be deployed to reduce the computational complexity of path property derivation. It first divides a change session into a set of valid elementary changes and then identifies the real necessary parts, based on the geographical relationships among the elementary changes, to be included in deriving dynamic path property. The feasibility and usefulness of the proposed path property notion and its associated analysis techniques have been proved by an operational prototype system.