Communication support for Petri nets based distributed controllers

This paper addresses the distributed execution of IOPT Petri nets models supported by a network of distributed controllers. Each controller is associated with a sub-model. Submodels use communication channels to exchange events allowing global evolution. Whenever controllers are interconnected through some kind of network, communication channels are implemented by communication nodes associated with each distributed controller. Communication nodes are characterized in terms of layers and buffers allowing their use with different types of communication and topologies. Their usage in a simple application example composed by a network of distributed controllers interconnected through a serial ring topology network is presented. Arduino boards are used as implementation platforms for proof-of-concept purposes.