reusing design experience for petri nets through patterns

Industrial applications of Petri nets for modeling and design often result in very complex models (Zurawski and Zhou 1994; Esser, Janneck, and Naedele 1997). Designers can handle this complexity much better if they can (re)use structures expressing expert modeling experience at a higher level of design and abstraction than the basic elements. In the software engineering domain this observation led to the recent trend of using software design patterns (Buschmann and Meunier 1995; Gamma et al. 1995). Our experience with Petri nets, an established and well researched visual language for systems modeling, simulation, and analysis (Murata 1989; Reisig 1992; Zurawski and Zhou 1994), in projects concerned with modeling of manufacturing machines (Esser, Janneck, and Naedele 1997; Naedele and Janneck 1998) and integrated circuits (Gries 1998), shows that patterns are very useful in this area as well. In this paper we continue work presented in (Naedele and Janneck 1998) describing a template to capture, document, and present design knowledge in the form of design patterns. Finally, the example of the modeling of an integrated circuit shows an application of that template.