ion Abstract: This paper seeks to establish within a formal framework how Coloured Petri Nets can be enhanced to produce Object Petri Nets. It does so by defining a number of intermediate Petri Net formalisms and identifying the features introduced at each step of the development. Object Petri Nets support a complete integration of object-oriented concepts into Petri Nets, including inheritance and the associated polymorphism and dynamic binding. In particular, Object Petri Nets have a single class hierarchy which includes both token types and subnet types. Interaction between subnets can be either synchronous or asynchronous depending on whether the subnet is defined as a super place or a super transition. The single class hierarchy readily supports multiple levels of activity in the net and the generation and removal of tokens has been defined so that all subcomponents are simultaneously generated or removed, thus simplifying memory management. Despite this descriptive power, Object...

Petri net variants are widely used as a workflow modelling technique. Recently, UML activity diagrams have been used for the same purpose, even though the syntax and semantics of activity diagrams has not been yet fully worked out. Nevertheless, activity diagrams seem very similar to Petri nets and on the surface, one may think that they are variants of each other. To substantiate or deny this claim, we need to formalise the intended semantics of activity diagrams and then compare this with various Petri net semantics. In previous papers we have defined two formal semantics for UML activity diagrams that are intended for workflow modelling. In this paper, we discuss the design choices that underlie these two semantics and investigate whether these design choices can be met in low-level and high-level Petri net semantics. We argue that the main di#erence between the Petri net semantics and our semantics of UML activity diagrams is that the Petri net semantics models resource usage of closed, active systems that are non-reactive, whereas our semantics of UML activity diagrams models open, reactive systems.

A short introduction of reference nets is given together with a motivation of the basic ingredients of this net formalism: dynamic creation of net instances, references to other net instances as tokens, and communication between net instances via synchronous channels. An implementation in Java is presented that augments reference nets with Java expressions as arc and transition inscriptions. The resulting tool aims mainly at rapid prototyping and workow applications.

This paper informally introduces Object Petri Nets (OPNs) with a number of examples and discusses how this kind of Petri Net addresses a number of issues pertinent to Concurrent Object-Oriented Programming Languages. OPNs support a thorough integration of object-oriented concepts into Petri Nets, including inheritance and the associated polymorphism and dynamic binding. They have a single class hierarchy which includes both token types and subnet types, thereby allowing multiple levels of activity in the net. Yet OPNs retain the important property of being able to be transformed into behaviourally equivalent Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs), which can provide a foundation for adapting existing analysis techniques such as invariant analysis.

: This paper seeks to present a more elegant and general definition of Object Petri Nets than previously. It is more general since it supports transition fusion as well as place fusion. It is more elegant because it captures all the notions of place substitution, transition substitution, place fusion, and transition fusion under the single notion of binding. This is achieved by explicitly supporting names in the formalism, in line with the p-calculus which recognises that names are pervasive and should be explicitly included in a formalism in order to model object mobility. The definition in this paper is also more consistent in its use of polymorphism and embodies a more obvious duality between states and changes of state. Object Petri Nets represent a complete integration of object-oriented concepts into Petri Nets. They have a single class hierarchy which includes both token types and subnet types, and which readily supports modelling systems with multiple levels of activity. Intera...

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Abstract—It is well known that requirements engineering plays a critical role in software quality. The use case approach is a requirements elicitation technique commonly used in industrial applications. Software requirements are stated as a collection of use cases, each of which is written in the user’s perspective and describes a specific flow of events in the system. The use case approach offers several practical advantages in that use case requirements are relatively easy to describe, understand, and trace. Unfortunately, there are a couple of major drawbacks. Since use cases are often stated in natural languages, they lack formal syntax and semantics. Furthermore, it is difficult to analyze their global system behavior for completeness and consistency, partly because use cases describe only partial behaviors and because interactions among them are rarely represented explicitly. In this paper, we propose the Constraints-based Modular Petri Nets(CMPNs) approach as an effective way to formalize the informal aspects of use cases. CMPNs, an extension of Place/Transition nets, allow the formal and incremental specification of requirements. The major contributions of our paper, in addition to the formal definitions of CMPNs, are the development of: 1) a systematic procedure to convert use cases stated in natural language to a CMPN model; and 2) a set of guidelines to find inconsistency and incompleteness in CMPNs. We demonstrate an application of our approach using use cases developed for telecommunications services.

Abstract. This work proposes a way to model the structure and behaviour of agents in terms of executable coloured Petri net protocols. Structure and behaviour are not all aspects of agent based computing: agents need a world to live in (mostly divided into platforms), they need a general structure (e.g. including a standard interface for communication) and their own special behaviour. Our approach tackles all three parts in terms of Petri nets. This paper skips the topic of agent platforms and handles the agent structure briefly to introduce a key concept of our work: the graphical modelling of the behaviour of autonomous and adaptive agents. A special kind of coloured Petri nets is being used throughout the work: reference nets. Complex agent behaviour is achieved via dynamic composition of simpler sub-protocols, a task that reference nets are especially well suited for. The inherent concurrency of Petri nets is another point that makes it easy to model agents: multiple threads of control are (nearly) automatically implied in Petri nets.

Renew is a computer tool that supports the development and execution of object-oriented

The problems of todays software engineering for complex distributed software systems with control as well as data processing aspects are manifold. Besides the general problem of software complexity we additionally have to deal with the problems of concurrency and distribution. A set of well evolved formalisms especially w.r.t. concurrency exists, while their integration into the common software engineering framework is still missing and related attempts have often not gained the intended acceptance. But ever increasing system complexity as well as a fast growing market for distributed software effectuate a shift towards high level behavior modeling. The presented OCoN approach does provide a high level behavior modeling as extension to the UML de-facto standard for object-oriented modeling. It is an approach to integrate an adjusted Petri net formalism with the software engineering world.