State space generation for Petri nets-based GALS systems

Abstract

This paper presents a tool that automatically generates state spaces of Globally-Asynchronous Locally-Synchronous (GALS) systems modeled through a non-autonomous Petri net class. The underlying class is the Input-Output Place-Transition Petri net (IOPT-nets) class extended with asynchronous channels and time domains. IOPT-nets benefits from an existing tool chain framework, which supports the development of automation and embedded systems, from the specification to implementation (through automatic code generation) in hardware and software platforms. The tool presented in this paper extends the existing tool chain framework, to support the verification of GALS systems. With the generated state space is possible to check the properties of each component of the GALS system and their interactions, allowing the verification of behavioral proprieties of the entire GALS system. The Petri net model of the GALS system is represented in PNML format and translated into a C program, assuring a good execution performance of the tool, even when handling large models (due to the compilation approach). The tool creates and saves the associated state space in an hierarchical XML file, which can be used to support its visualization and proprieties analysis through queries.