The proliferation of heterogeneous, distributed computer networks has led to an urgent need for constructing reliable and ef-®cient communication protocol converter, to facilitate the internetworking between such networks. Most existing converter design methods are based on the communicating ®nite state machine (CFSM) model as the formal description technique to describe the protocols, their services and the converter design. Two drawbacks of CFSM model are the state explosion problem and the

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... ability of the model to express concurrent behaviors of protocols and services. These drawbacks may be overcome by using Petri nets as the formal description technique. Moreover, a reliable converter must perform its conversion functions in a timely manner satisfying the timing constraints of both protocol architectures. Our paper adopts the Timed Petri net (TPN) model to ful®ll this requirement. The paper also highlights the dynamicity of the derived converter. We illustrate the converter design method using an example showing the dynamicity and timeliness features of the converter. Ó 0164-1212/99/$ ± see front matter Ó 1999 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights reserved. PII: S 0 1 6 4 -1 2 1 2 ( 9 9 ) 0 0 0 2 4 -2