Software modeling and analysis using a hierarchical object-oriented Petri net

Petri net is used widely to analyze and model various systems formally. Rec ently, many Petri nets mania devote their efforts to enhancing and extendin g the expressive power of Petri nets. One such effort is to extend Petri ne ts with object-oriented concepts. An object-oriented paradigm provides exce llent concepts to model real-world problems. Object-oriented concepts allow us to build software systems easily, intuitively, and naturally. Although several high-level Petri nets with the concept of objects are suggested, th ese nets do not fully support the object-oriented concepts. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical object-oriented Petri net (HOONet). The formal sy ntax and semantics of HOONet are explained in detail. HOONet supports a wid e range of object-oriented features including abstract, encapsulated and mo dularized objects, object interaction by message passing, inheritance, and ploymorphism. HOONet also supports a variety of modeling and analysis mecha nisms such as incremental modeling of evolving systems, unfolding the HOONe t to lower level Petri net, and incremental reachability analysis for HOONe t models. We demonstrate the usefulness of HOONet by applying it to modelin g and analysis with an example. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science Inc. All rights r eserved.