Towards reusable colored Petri nets

Reuse has long been recognized as a key technology that can bring about significant productivity gains in software development. Code level reuse is well understood and frequently practiced. However reuse in software requirements, another phase where much benefit can be expected, remains inadequately addressed. Hierarchical colored Petri net (HCPN) formalism has been successfully used on several large scale industrial projects, and it includes features designed to enhance modularity and understandability of the model. Unfortunately, such features fall short of making HCPN reusable. We provide formal definitions of RCPN as a reuse extension to the HCPN. RCPN can reduce complexity and cost of modeling and analysis in requirements engineering phase and increase software development productivity. We demonstrate an application of RCPN by demonstrating how a RCPN component for water level monitoring system (WLMS) can be reused in a coffee vending machine (CVM) model