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 andtechniques of the system design. Increasing complexity of developedsystems makes the design process more exacting. The need for betterquality of the development processes is growing up too. As an answer tothese requirements, new software engineering methods are raising. Theyare commonly known as Model-Driven Software Development or Model-BasedDesign (MBD). An important feature of these methods is the fact thatthey use executable models, for instance, the most popular one isObject Management Group's Model Driven Architecture (MDA) based onExecutable UML. The designer creates models and checks theircorrectness by simulation so that there is no need to make a prototype.The development methods allow for semi-automatic translation of checkedmodels to implementation language (i.e. the code generation).Unfortunately, the resulting code is not final, the code is supposed tobe adapted and these changes are usually not moved back to models.Consequently, the models can become outdated and in most cases loosetheir value -- models do not correspond to the final implementation,possible changes are more and more demanding and it may consequent lessproductivity in the complex systems design. We base our approach to thesystem development on simulation models which have a proper formalbackground and can be integrated into target application with no needto generate a code. Thus, we start with simulation models but duringthe development process we are obtaining more and more adequateapplication. The models we use are based on Object-oriented Petri netsformalism. Presence of models in final implementation opens apossibility to make maintenance and adaptation to changing requirementsmore productive.