Purposes of the PNtalk System

The system PNtalk is a language and tool based on the object-orientedPetri nets intended for model a non-trivial concurrent and distributedsoftware system. They have been developed by our research group at BrnoUniversity of Technology. PNtalk benefits from the features of Petrinets (formal nature, suggestive description of parallelism, theoreticalbackground) as well as object-orientedness (abstraction, encapsulation,inheritance, polymorphism, and modularity). The goal of this paper isthe reflection on the PNtalk system and on its design. It investigatesPNtalk's ability to model, simulate, and prototyping with respectingthe open environment allowing heterogeneous modeling (there can becombinedmore different modeling paradigms), distributed simulation, advancedsimulation techniques, and self-modification of the models,simulations, or the system.