In mobile interactive systems, there exist several components that can move and interact with each other. The current methods fail to give a comprehensive description of their properties and have inadequate modeling and analysis capacity for them. This paper concludes three system properties called system connectivity, interaction soundness and data validity, and focuses on their modeling and analysis based on Variable Petri Nets (VPNs), which have recently been proposed and are able to describe their dynamic interactions. A VPN-based model including component nets and interaction structure nets is constructed given a mobile interactive system. It depicts its structure and event-driven dynamics. Three properties and their related analysis methods of a VPN-based model are presented. An example is given to demonstrate the proposed concepts and methods. Note to Practitioners —Due to the mobility and frequent disconnections, the correctness of mobile interaction systems, such as mobile robot systems and mobile payment systems, are often difficult to analyze. This paper introduces three critical properties of systems, called system connectivity, interaction soundness and data validity, and presents a related modeling and analysis method, based on a kind of Petri net called VPN. For a given system, a model including component nets and interaction structure nets is constructed by using VPNs. The component net describes the internal process of each component, while the interaction structure net reflects the dynamic interaction between components. Based on this model, three properties are defined and analyzed. The case study of a practical mobile payment system shows the effectiveness of the proposed method.

Mobile computing systems, service-based systems, and some other systems with mobile interacting components have recently received much attention. However, because of their characteristics, such as mobility and disconnection, it is difficult to model and analyze them by using a structure-fixed model. This work proposes a new Petri net model called variable Petri net (VPN) for modeling and analyzing these systems. The definition, firing rule, and related analysis technology of VPN are introduced in detail. In a VPN, the possible interaction interfaces are abstracted as a new kind of places called virtual places, and the occurrences of (dis)connections are described by new functions, which makes it appropriate to describe the component collaboration in systems and realize the scalability and pluggability of systems. Moreover, to overcome the shortcoming that markings cannot reflect the link capability of a system, VPNs add a constraint function along with a marking to represent a complete system configuration. Several examples are used to demonstrate the newly proposed model and method.

The properties of dynamic interactions in mobile-interactive systems are still difficult to analyze because of the complexity of systems. Thus, we have proposed a new Petri net called the variable petri net (VPN) recently, which specializes in describing dynamic interactions in systems. To make better use of VPN, this article focuses on the model checking method of VPN. It introduces the algorithm to transform a VPN to a Kripke structure that can describe both the system running states and the system connection states in VPN, and the method to transform a property to a temporal logic formula based on VPN and its Kripke structure. The Kripke structure can be optimized by considering the specific property about the system connection states and then be used to perform the targeted verification to the property by using a model checker. A practical example is given to demonstrate the proposed methods.