On structuring mechanisms for Petri nets based system design

This paper presents several structuring techniques applied to high-level Petri net models of embedded systems. Several modeling aspects are covered supporting the module concept, from the input and output structured modeling, and node structuring mechanism, to the more traditional hierarchical decomposition. Three types of Petri net nodes are used to support module representation: macro-places, macro-transitions and macro-blocks. Specific techniques to produce the executable model from the hierarchically structured model are presented. An application to an automation example is also presented.