From Formal Specifications to Ready-to-Use Software Components: The Concurrent Object-Oriented Petri Net Approach

CO-OPN (Concurrent Object Oriented Petri Net) is a formal specification language for modelling distributed systems; it is based on coordinated algebraic Petri nets. In this paper we describe a method for generating an executable prototype from a CO-OPN specification. We focus our discussion on the generation of executable code for CO-OPN classes. CO-OPN classes are defined using Petri Nets. The main problems arise when implementing synchronization and non-determinism of CO-OPN classes in procedural languages. Our method proposes a solution to these problems. Another interesting aspect of our method is the easy integration of a generated prototype into any existing system. This paper focuses on the generation of Java code that fulfils the Java Beans component architecture, however our approach is also applicable to other object-oriented implementation languages with a component architecture.