Goldfish: A Collaborative Web-Based Petri Net Editor with Real-Time Synchronization

Goldfish: A Collaborative Web-Based Petri Net Editor with Real-Time Synchronization

Kabakov V.A. (NRU HSE, Moscow, Russia)
Mitsyuk A.A. (NRU HSE, Moscow, Russia)

Abstract

Petri nets are a well-established formalism for modeling concurrent and distributed systems, yet existing Petri net editors are predominantly desktop applications without collaborative editing capabilities. This paper presents Goldfish, a cloud-based web platform for real-time collaborative editing, simulation, and analysis of Petri net models. The core contribution is the adaptation of Operational Transformation (OT) techniques to graph-based Petri net structures: we define a domain-specific operation model comprising 9 primitive operation types, formulate transformation rules that preserve bipartite graph invariants and handle cascading structural dependencies, and combine OT with selective element locking for semantically critical operations. The resulting hybrid synchronization mechanism is estimated to resolve the majority of editing conflicts transparently via OT in typical usage scenarios – where concurrent operations target disjoint model elements – invoking locking only for operations with cascading effects such as element deletion. Complexity analysis confirms that all per-operation synchronization costs are independent of model size. The platform integrates standard Petri net analysis capabilities – reachability graph construction, boundedness verification, and interactive simulation – within the collaborative environment via an asynchronous execution model that avoids blocking concurrent editing sessions. Complexity analysis of the proposed algorithms shows that all per-operation synchronization costs are constant or linear in small parameters (log gap, pending queue size, node degree); these bounds hold independently of model size, supporting scalability with respect to the number of concurrent editors.

Keywords

Petri nets; collaborative editing; real-time synchronization; operational transformation; conflict resolution; web-based modeling; process model visualization.

Edition

Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming, vol. 38, issue 6, part 2, 2026, pp. 117-132

ISSN 2220-6426 (Online), ISSN 2079-8156 (Print).

DOI: 10.15514/ISPRAS-2026-38(6)-28

For citation

Kabakov V.A., Mitsyuk A.A. Goldfish: A Collaborative Web-Based Petri Net Editor with Real-Time Synchronization. Proceedings of the Institute for System Programming, vol. 38, issue 6, part 2, 2026, pp. 117-132 DOI: 10.15514/ISPRAS-2026-38(6)-28.

Full text of the paper in pdf Back to the contents of the volume