A component-based Petri net model for specifying and validating cooperative information systems

Abstract

This paper presents fundamentals of a novel framework adequately tailored for specifying and validating complex information systems as fully distributed, autonomous yet cooperating components. The proposed framework, referred to as C o-nets, is a multi-paradigm soundly integrating object-oriented (OO) structuring mechanisms, modularity concepts and some constructions from semantical data modeling into an appropriate variety of algebraic Petri nets. The model is semantically interpreted in a true concurrency way using an adequate instantiation of rewriting logic. C o-nets main features may be highlighted as follows: firstly, C o-nets allow to build autonomous components as a hierarchy of OO classes with explicit interfaces. Each component behaves with respect to an intra-component evolution pattern that fully exhibits intra- as well as inter-object concurrency. Secondly, while such components autonomously behave they may interact with each other using their explicit interfaces and respecting an inter-component interaction pattern. Thirdly, from a methodological point of view, C o-nets components may be incrementally conceived from well known semi-informal OO diagrams. Besides that, thanks to their rewriting-logic based semantics, C o-nets components are validated using concurrent rewriting techniques simultaneously accompanied by graphical animations. C o-nets practicability is illustrated through a non-trivial case study, and all C o-nets features are compared to similar existing OO formalisms on the basis of some exhaustive criteria.