Using Petri Nets to Enable the Simulation of Application Integration Solutions Conceptual Models

Abstract

Enterprise application integration concerns with the use of methodologies and tools to design and implement integration solutions to integrate a set of heterogeneous enterprise applications. Amongst the integration technologies to design and implement integration solutions is Guarana. This technology provides a domain-specific language that enables the design of conceptual models. The quality of these models is essential to ensure proper integration. Discovering whether an integration solution can fail and in which conditions it is more likely to happen is a costly, risky, and time-consuming task, since current approaches require software engineers to construct the real solution. Generally, simulation is recommended when problems are impossible or expensive to be solved by actual experimentation. Guarana conceptual models can be classified as stochastic, dynamic, and discrete, and thus it can be simulated taking the advantage of well-established techniques and tools for discrete-event simulation. Therefore, this paper proposes a simulation of Guarana solutions by using Petri nets, in order to analyse such solutions based only on the conceptual models. It shows that an integration solution conceptual model designed with Guarana can be translated into a formal model structured as a Stochastic Petri net. The equivalence of both models is verified by comparing the operation of the Guarana runtime system with the behaviour of a Petri net execution process.