Implementation of on-line simulation with the colored Petri net simulator RENEW

For parts of our work in the field of on-line simulation, we use the colored Petri net simulator RENEW, which has been developed at the University of Hamburg; it implements a high-level Petri net formalism called reference nets which allows their tokens to be in turn reference nets, leading to dynamic nesting of Petri nets. This feature is crucial for implementation of on-line simulation; this is one of the main reasons why we decided to use RENEW. The simulator allows for interacting with external code written in Java, enabling us to implement on-line simulation in a widely deployed programming language. In this paper, we present our on-line simulation package.