David Mosteller

Renew 2.5 – Towards a Comprehensive Integrated Development Environment for Petri Net-Based Applications

Renew (The Reference Net Workshop) is an extensible Petri net IDE that supports the development and execution of high-level Petri nets and other modeling techniques. The Reference net formalism – the major formalism for Renew – includes concepts such as net instances, synchronous channels and seamless Java integration. It combines the advantages of Petri nets and object-oriented programming for the development of concurrent and distributed software systems. Modeling support of Renew focuses on convenience and ease for Petri net development. An outstanding feature is the support for multi-formalism simulation. The plugin architecture of Renew enables the developers to extend the IDE for instance with additional formalisms. Alternatively to the inline mode – within the graphical user interface – the Simulator can also be run in a headless server fashion. Several configurations of Renew are available, which are constituted through selections of plugins providing specialized functionality for multiple platforms. In this manner the Renew family constitutes a product line architecture. Renew is available free of charge including the Java source code. In this contribution we provide information about Renew’s functionality and architecture as well as the development of the tool set over the last decade.

Modeling Organizational Structures and Agent Knowledge for Mulan Applications

In software engineering the initial setup of a system, as well as the self-adaptation processes within a system are challenging tasks. We address these challenges by providing explications of organizational structures through modeling. In this paper we present a service-oriented perspective on the organizational structure of MAS and we present modeling techniques and tools for supporting this perspective. We pursue a model-driven approach and a tight integration between various models on the one hand and between the models and the generated code on the other hand. In particular, we use ontologies to define a meta-model for organizational structures in a way that we can easily generate the initial content of agent knowledge bases in the form of FIPA semantic language (SL) fragments, depending on the positions the agents occupy in the context of the organizational structure. This allows the agents to reason and to communicate about their organizational embedding, which is a prerequisite for self-adaptation in multi-agent systems.

Software development with Petri nets and agents: Approach, frameworks and tool set

Abstract Software development – especially of distributed and concurrent systems – requires sophisticated frameworks and tool support for the individual and collaborative development. We present an approach for the development of such systems, which applies concepts, technologies and techniques from agent and Petri net theory as well as from software engineering. The approach is backed by a set of elaborated frameworks and a powerful tool set. The Petri Net-based Agent-Oriented Software Engineering approach ( Paose ) follows the multi-agent paradigm and applies Petri net formalisms as implementation languages. Paose is a comprehensive approach that provides techniques, tools, methods, principles and defined processes. Paose depends on Mulan (Multi-Agent Nets), which is a conceptual framework for a multi-agent platform based on Petri net models. Mulan is modeled and executed in Renew (The Reference Net Workshop), which is an extensible modeling and execution environment for Reference Net-based systems and other modeling techniques. The whole framework landscape constitutes a Petri net IDE (Integrated Development Environment) that supports the development and execution of concurrent and distributed multi-agent systems. The Reference Net formalism includes concepts such as net instances (object-orientation), synchronous channels (communication/synchronization) and a seamless Java integration. In this contribution we present an overview of the frameworks and the tool sets in the context of the Paose approach. We focus in detail on the highlights and the IDE features of Renew , without which the collaborative development of distributed Paose -based software would not be feasible.

Utilizing Petri Nets for Teaching in Practical Courses on Collaborative Software Engineering

Teaching the application of Petri nets to software development is a major challenge for the Petri net community. We face this during our practical courses in that we teach the Paose-approach. Students need to get acquainted with the development tools. At the beginning of each course, we start with an introduction phase, which is followed by an intensification phase. In order to support the teachers as well as the students, we use explicated process models to restructure and augment the worksheets. The resulting worksheets enable the students to follow the structure of the processes step by step. In the last two projects, we already applied the restructured and augmented worksheets. We noticed that the students were able to process the worksheets more independently and were less confused and frustrated. In general this lead to a more relaxed teaching atmosphere. In this contribution we provide detailed insights into the teaching approach. We demonstrate our current best practices for teaching Petri nets in practical settings. In this regard, we describe how Petri nets can be utilized to improve learning materials (e.g. worksheets) and to this end, the effects of our restructured and augmented learning materials are evaluated.

Integrating Petri Net Semantics in a Model-Driven Approach: The Renew Meta-Modeling and Transformation Framework

This paper presents an approach to the development of modeling languages and automated generation of specific modeling tools based on meta-models. Modeling is one of the main tasks in engineering. Graphical modeling helps the engineer not only to understand the system but also to communicate with engineers and with other stakeholders that participate in the development (or analytic) process.