Model-based Software Engineering for/with Petri Nets

On these pages, you will find the material of the tutorial on "Model-based Software Engineering for/with Petri Nets", which will be held by Ekkart Kindler on Tuesday, June 25, 2019 in Aachen during Petri Nets/ACSD 2019.

People who participate in the tutorial and, in particular, in its hands-on part (small project), should have installed Eclipse EMT and the ePNK as discussed below before the tutorial starts.

Overview

Model-based Software Engineering (MBSE) is a catch-all term for software development technologies in which models are more than just “nice sketches” or “drawings”. In MBSE, models are mostly used for generating some parts of the code automatically from models or for executing models directly. The OMG’s Model Driven Architecture (MDA) is probably one of the most prominent approaches in this direction, and Eclipse EMF is a very popular technology supporting MBSE. But, MBSE also covers approaches that are more focused on analyzing or verifying software models.

Petri nets have been used for modelling for a long time now, and they have been successfully used in different areas of software and systems development. Though Petri nets are used in all stages of software development, many approaches focus on the early phases of the development process and for building prototypes; the actual software is often still programmed manually.

This tutorial presents the idea, the main concepts, and some technologies of MBSE — with the focus on automatic code generation. On the one hand, these technologies can be used for developing Petri net tools in a more efficient way. On the other hand, they can be used to generate parts of the software automatically from Petri net models. More importantly, we will see how Petri nets and the code generated from them can be integrated with other software.

The tutorial will be based on the experiences with Eclipse EMF and developing the ePNK based on EMF, and discuss the lessons learned with developing the ECNO Tool, which allows to generate software completely automatically from models which consists of the Event Coordination Notation and ECNO nets (which are a special version of Petri nets for modeling the life-cycle of its components).

Preparation

For the practical part, particpants of this tutorial should install Eclipse EMT (Eclipse with the Eclipse Modeling Tools package preinstalled); Eclipse EMT can be downloaded from https://www.eclipse.org/downloads/packages/release/2019-03/r/eclipse-modeling-tools (note that you need to install the 64-bit version of Java to run Eclipse).

In this version of Eclipse, you should install the ePNK as discussed in the release notes of the ePNK 1.2. You should install all features from the three categories: "ePNK Features", "ePNK Experimental Features", and "HLPNG Simulator" (if you want, you can install also the ECNO Tool features; but these are not needed for the practical part of the tutorial).

Schedule and Material

9⁰⁰-10³⁰

MBSE overview (01-PN-Course-MBSE.pdf)

vision, idea, concepts
technologies (overview)

Presentation of project(s) (05-PN-Course-Project.pdf)

10³⁰-11⁰⁰ Coffee break

11⁰⁰-12³⁰

Technology details

Generating code with JET (02-PN-Course-M2T.pdf)

Modelling behaviour

Behaviour coordination (03-PN-Course-BehaviourModelling.pdf)

12³⁰-13³⁰ Lunch break

13³⁰-15⁰⁰

Model-based technology in Petri nets (04-PN-Course-PNML-ePNK.pdf)

PNML (overview of concepts)
ePNK (overview and experiences)

15⁰⁰-15³⁰ Coffee break

15³⁰-17^xx

Hands-on work (05-PN-Course-Project.pdf, 06-PN-Course-Project-Details.pdf)

individual work (with assistance and some demos with basic project setup) based on prepared projects (see 06-PN-Course-Project-Details.pdf on how to use these): pntd-plugin.initial.zip, coge-generator.initial.zip, and test-it.zip. Participants, who prefer to watch screencasts will find the discussion of the task and the main two steps for solving the task on the project page.
brief evaluation and discussion

This will be individual hands-on work on a small project, so you should have installed Eclipse EMT and the ePNK as discussed above before the start of the tutorial.