Simulation and Design of Systems with Object Oriented Petri Nets

Modeling, Simulation, Object-Oriented Petri Nets, Model-Based Design

Software engineering is a science discipline dealing with methods and techniques of the system design. Increasing complexity of developed systems makes the design process more exacting. The need for better quality of the development processes is growing up too. As an answer to these requirements, new software engineering methods are raising. They are commonly known as Model-Driven Software Development or Model-Based Design (MBD). An important feature of these methods is the fact that they use executable models, for instance, the most popular one is Object Management Group's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) based on Executable UML. The designer creates models and checks their correctness by simulation so that there is no need to make a prototype. The development methods allow for semi-automatic translation of checked models to implementation language (i.e. the code generation). Unfortunately, the resulting code is not final, the code is supposed to be adapted and these changes are usually not moved back to models. Consequently, the models can become outdated and in most cases loose their value -- models do not correspond to the final implementation, possible changes are more and more demanding and it may consequent less productivity in the complex systems design. We base our approach to the system development on simulation models which have a proper formal background and can be integrated into target application with no need to generate a code. Thus, we start with simulation models but during the development process we are obtaining more and more adequate application. The models we use are based on Object-oriented Petri nets formalism. Presence of models in final implementation opens a possibility to make maintenance and adaptation to changing requirements more productive.