System Composition Using Petri Nets and DEVS Formalisms

This paper is part of the work dealing with system development and deployment, where the system behavior should be modeled by formalisms allowing to define workflow scenarios and offering an interface for workflows synchronization. One such formalism is represented by Object Oriented Petri Nets (OOPN). OOPN are based on well-known class-based approach enriched by concurrency. Nevertheless, OOPN lacks one important element---a hierarchy followed by a simple way to model items exchanges on the fly. Therefore, the formalism of Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) is taken into account. In the presented approach, the OOPN model is split up into DEVS components. Each component can be coupled with another component through the same compatible interface. A combination of OOPN and DEVS formalisms is used to compose the system using DEVS-based components, where each such component is modeled by means of OOPN. It preserves the advantages of using OOPN for behavior modeling and makes it possible to hierarchize models. The paper deals with the combination of both formalisms and compares the classic object approach to the component approach for system composition.