Synchronous Petri nets: formalisation and interpretation

Synchronous languages (SL) aim at a better response to the needs of reactive real-time system programming. They make simpler the time dependent reasoning. The SL programming style is highly parallel, hierarchical and clear. On the other hand, Petri nets (PN) are an asynchronous graphical tool which, using various extensions (temporal, temporized, or synchronized), are useful for expressing real-time specification. Unfortunately, both of these two formalisms present drawbacks. The synchronous Petri nets (SynPN) are a real-time modelling and programming tool which combines the advantages of synchronous languages and those of Petri nets. Synchronous Petri nets are based on the fully synchronized PN, full priority PN and on the instantaneous diffusion mechanism. It is built around a synchronous interpreter. The aim of this study is, on one hand to introduce the synchronous Petri nets formalism, and, on the other hand, to explain the relation between the SynPN formalism and the synchronous language ESTEREL. In fact, the authors have defined a formal translation of ESTEREL programs into SynPN models