On the Use of Coloured Petri Nets for Object-Oriented Design

Abstract. Behaviour specification in object-oriented design clearly benefits from the use of a formal, or semi-formal, visual specification language. This is attested by the adoption of a statecharts based notation by the Unified Modelling Language specification, and also by the several object-inspired Petri net classes. This paper defines a class of highlevel nets, named Composable Coloured Petri nets, allowing the use of Coloured Petri nets in object-oriented design, namely for the specification of synchronous and asynchronous communication among objects, three most common abstractions: generalisation, classification, and composition. Starting from Coloured Petri nets, the paper shows how those abstractions can be modelled based on node fusion and with minimally intrusive syntax additions. Node fusions take two forms: one for g message passing, abstracting the interactions between objects, her for modelling generalisation and composition, abstracting the system static structu...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: APN
• Authors: João Paulo Barros, Luís Gomes
• Keywords: APN 2004, Artificial Intelligence, Coloured Petri Nets, Object-oriented Design, Petri Nets