Rapid prototyping through communicating Petri nets

The design and implementation of a tool for the construction of distributed systems are described. This tool is based on a specification model which extends ordinary Petri nets to include functional and structural concepts. Functional extensions give the model specification completeness, whereas structuring extensions support the organization of the system under development into a set of message passing modules. The augmented model is named communicating Petri net (CmPN). After an introduction to communicating Petri nets, an outline of the software lifecycle activities enforced by the tool under development is given. Two different methods for automatic code generation are expounded and compared in terms of both computational run-time overhead and code dimension (in the case of an example comprised of four CmPNs)