PATTERNS IN COLORED PETRI NETS

Abstract

Colored Petri Nets (CPN) is a graphical language, which is extensively used for modeling and analysis of distributed systems with elements of concurrency. It has proven to be a good platform for modeling of process-aware information systems, workflow analysis, design of communication protocols, embedded systems, and distributed systems, etc. The challenge that we undertake in this report is to document a set of 34 empirically gathered patterns in Colored Petri Nets in the pattern format. The main goal of the CPN pattern catalog is to serve as a source of sound solutions, proven by experience, for problems appearing during modeling by means of CPN. Furthermore, the CPN patterns can be used as a domain language for communicating problems and solutions. In order to help developers in selecting a suitable pattern, we made classification of patterns and analyzed relationships between patterns for easy navigation through the CPN pattern language.