In: Research Report LRI, Orsay (F) Nr. 0700. 1991.
Abstract: This paper provides with a description of how to use a formalism called CO-OPN (Concurrent Object Oriented Petri Nets), which incorporates both concurrency and data structuring features, for open distributed program development. CO-OPN is a structured extension of Petri nets and algebraic abstract data types.CO-OPN specification is composed of a set of objects (algebraic abstract data types and Petri nets), and of a synchronous communication mechanism. We describe in which way it is possible to specify open distributed programs with CO-OPN and under what assumption it is possible to gather open systems through the use of standardized communication components specified with CO-OPN. Moreover the refinement capabilities of CO-OPN on the Petri net part and the algebraic abstract data type part allow powerful specification refinements in order to reach implementations.