Module Composition within Petri Nets Model-based Development

Model based development within the area of hardware-software embedded systems co-design has been used as a major attitude to support embedded system complexity increasing during the last decade. Several modeling formalisms are very well matched for usage within this area. One of the main goals of the work presented in this paper is to contribute for the usage of Petri nets as the system-level specification language within model-based development of embedded systems using co-design techniques. System model partitioning into modules and components ready to be implemented in hardware or software and be deployed into a distributed platform is a major concern within co-design methodologies. A net operation, called net splitting, is used in this paper in order to decompose a Petri net model into several Petri net submodels, which will be executed in parallel using synchronous communication channels. Those Petri net sub-models are seen as modules or components ready to be used for distributed execution of the initial model. In this paper, we propose a set of techniques to allow module replication and their composition in new situations, supporting module reutilization, which has a key impact factor within engineering activities. The proposed techniques rely on keeping the module interface unchanged in order to support the integration of the module in new situations.