A method of concurrent object-oriented design using high-level Petri nets

Abstract

This paper presents a new method of designing large concurrent systems which is based on a combination of object-oriented design and high-level Petri nets. Object-oriented technology has well established design techniques but lacks analysis and verification methods of the designed system and concurrency aspects. On the other hand, Petri nets is a well defined formalism of parallel systems modeling and analysis (including conflict resolution, allocation, etc.) that lacks clear and effective specification of system design techniques. The method presented in the paper takes advantage of both object-oriented design and high-level Petri nets by using object-oriented technology in the design stage and high-level Petri nets in the analysis stage. The result is a fully designed and analyzed model of a system in an object-oriented sense as well as in a high-level Petri net sense. It means that there exists two 'views' of a system: object-oriented and Petri net, which can be used separately or in combination depending on the needs of the designer.