In: Proceeding of the 16th International Conference on Application and Theory of Petri Nets, Turin, June 1995., pages 141-160. 1995.
Abstract: The development of concurrent applications, which consist of several parallel, often distriuted, activities that communicate and synchronize with each other, presents challenging logical and technological issues. In the common practice, technological aspects, which are related to the definition of concurrent processes as well as of their interactions, often place constraints on the logical ones. Consequently, the flexibility that could be attained during design is reduced and, further, an actual implementation where both aspects are deeply intermixed is usually obtained. This paper first presents an expressive and flexible language b ased on object-oriented high-level nets, which allows designers to naturally represent concurrency and synchronization. Then, it illustrates a powerful software engineering environment, CAB (Concurrent Applications Builder), which supports the building and the simulation/animation of models as well as the automatic generation of applications from models (by transforming the models's objects into implementation processes). A case study from an actual project is illustrated.