Information Systems Development with the Help of Petri Nets

Abstract

Many present software systems can be developed by a sequence of transformations from the source specification to the final implementation. An interesting question is whether we can support such a sequence of transformations by some formal apparatus that enables to verify succeeding steps of development, and finally also the whole development process. As an example, we use the transformation of a definition of the set of system nodes defined as classical workflow models, and then transform them into a set of Petri nets representing the target system implementation. Such a transformation supports development of software systems, whose specification is based on classical workflow models, but the implementation is based on Petri nets. Each part of the designed system is translated from workflow model into a set of Petri nets, and interpreted by the set of special Petri Nets Virtual Machines (PNVMs) which are installed on all nodes of the system. The method is illustrated on the example of house heating system.

Keywords

• model transformations
• petri nets
• formally-based systems development
• workflow modeling
• language interpretation