Using coloured Petri nets to aid the design of object-based systems

As middleware and networking technologies improve, heterogenous distributed systems are expected to become commonplace. An object-based approach to designing these systems has been adopted by ISO and ITU-T in their standardisation of the reference model for open distributed processing. An important infrastructure object within these systems is the recently standardised Trader which provides objects with a dynamic resource location service. In order to engineer reliable open object-based distributed systems, it is important to perform modelling and analysis as part of the design process. In this paper, we model the Trader using coloured Petri nets and the Design/CPN^TM tool. The model is described, and verification of the model using simulation and occurrence graph analysis is presented