Modeling With Colored Petri Nets: Specification, Verification, and Performance Evaluation of Systems

Background

Petri nets represent a unification of a graphical language introduced by Frank and Lillian Gilbreth for production processes specification. Their most significant advantage consists in the possibility of applying formal methods for their analysis. Though, general Petri nets are too abstract to be a convenient tool for a specialist in some application area. Developed by Jensen and Kristensen (2009) colored Petri nets are loaded by a functional programming language that makes their application less laborious and more concise. A colored Petri net represents a computationally universal system that allows their wide application not only for specification and modeling but for programming and control as well.

Dodd (2006) started a professional application of colored Petri nets for modeling in an avionics mission computer. Then a few works appeared which develop the application of colored Petri nets in the aviation and aerospace industries with modeling a landing detector (Kordon, 2016), auto flight control system (Bourdil et al, 2016) and others.

The authors of this chapter have gained a strong experience in colored Petri nets with teaching them for more than a decade, developing enterprise-level models, and applying them in research projects. The first paper (Zaitsev, 2004) that develops a switched Ethernet model represents a personal record of citation. Note that, the modern avionics protocol AFDX (ARINC, 2009) represents a specialization of a general switched Ethernet technology. Then a series of papers have been published which present models of MPLS networks (Zaitsev & Sakun, 2008), develop a new parametric modeling paradigm (Zaitsev & Shmeleva, 2009), and analyze threats in modern computing grids (Zaitsev et al, 2014) and (Zaitsev et al, 2016). Supplied with the measuring fragments, the technique was presented for the first time in (Zaitsev, 2004) and further developed with recent works, our library of models represents a condensed experience and is distributed via official site of CPN Tools http://cpntools.org.