I had a rather random idea. Music seems like it could be modeled by a petri net. A petri net can model distributed systems, such as the instruments in a band, mathematically. I googled it and it seems like that I’m not the first to think of this. I think one of the first papers to model music with a petri net was “Music and Causality” in 1983. So, seven years after petri nets were formalized they were applied to music.
Could model the system of how the agents are operating in the environment as a petri net. Going to different tasks and using different resources at a top level to measure system efficiency. This might be a useful way to look at comparing coordination mechanisms especially for bounty hunting. Something similar to this idea was discussed on this site. What if we considered the agents as resources as well…
I might also be able to use them as a deductive device to realize where some inefficiency due to mis-coordination or deadlock are in the system and can develop ideas on how to improve/fix them… That would be nice to have. It would also allow me to create custom benchmarks that show that my system is able to solve such problems. That would be awesome! This seems like a good idea. Contract nets did this to prove particular aspects of there system in this paper.
Now I think that the people in Milan Italy are really interested in Petri nets. I just need to find out how I can go to Italy :).