In: Proceedings of Applications and Theory of Petri Nets 2004: 25th International Conference, ICATPN 2004, Bologna, Italy, June 21-25, 2004, pages 117-136. Volume 3099 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Cortadella, Reisig (Eds.) --- Springer-Verlag, September 2004.
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 high-level 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, and the 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 modelling message passing, abstracting the interactions between objects, and another for modelling generalisation and composition, abstracting the system static structure.