Esprit basic research action 3148 DEMON (Design methods based on nets) — Aims, scope and achievements — -- The box calculus: A new causal algebra with multi-label communication -- Modular functional modelling of petri nets with individual tokens -- Interleaving semantics and action refinement with atomic choice -- Maximality preservation and the ST-idea for action refinements -- A fifo-net model for processes with asynchronous communication -- A basic-net algebra for program semantics and its application to occam -- The effect of Vector synchronization: Residue and loss -- Modelling systems with dynamic priorities -- On distributed languages and models for concurrency -- Partial words versus processes: A short comparison -- A survey of basic net models and modular net classes -- Structural techniques and performance bounds of stochastic Petri net models -- A survey of recognizable languages of infinite traces -- A survey of equivalence notions for net based systems.

The main aims of the series of volumes "Advances in Petri Nets" are: - to present to the "outside" scientific community a fair picture of recent advances in the area of Petri nets, and - to encourage those interested in the applications and theory of concurrent systems to take a closer look at Petri nets and then join the group of researchers working in this fascinating and challenging area. The ESPRIT Basic Research Action DEMON (DEsign Methods based On Nets) has been a focus of developments withinthe Petri net community for the last three years. The papers presented in this special volume have been selected from papers submitted by participants in DEMON. The papers have been refereed and appear in revised form. The volume contains technical contributions giving insights into a number of major achievements of the DEMON project. It also contains four survey papers covering important research areas. The volume begins witha description of DEMON given by its coordinator E. Best.