In: Workshop OOP&MC within the ICATPN'95, Torino, Italy. June 1995.
Abstract: Petri Nets (PNs) provide a powerful tool to model and simulate the behaviour of complex systems. Electronic CAD tools for parallel digital systems -supporting hierarchical structures of control and data paths- may benefit from Synchronous Interpreted Petri Nets (SIPNs). A system specification based on a SIPN can be supported by the set of tools presented here, which formally validate the behaviour of the system (the control path), executes and animates the SIPN model and generates VHDL code for circuit simulation and synthesis. An object-oriented environment is used to construct and to animate PN-based specifications, that fully implements an agent based computation model, MCBA, and its associated language, LiSA. This approach takes advantage of both object oriented and concurrent programming paradigms, where each entity in a PN is modelled as an agent - an autonomous and active concurrent entity, which has its own behaviour and channels for interaction.