Snoopy: a tool to design and animate/simulate graph-based formalisms

We sketch the fundamental properties and features of Snoopy, a tool to model and execute (animate, simulate) hierarchical graph-based system descriptions. The tool comes along with several pre-fabricated graph classes, especially some kind of Petri nets and other related graphs, and facilitates a comfortable integration of further graph classes due to its generic design. To support an aspect-oriented model engineering, different graph classes may be used simultaneously. Snoopy provides some features (hierarchical nodes, logical nodes), which are particularly useful for larger models, or models with an higher connectivity degree. There are several Petri net classes available, among them the purely qualitative place/transition nets in its standard definition and in a version enhanced by four special arcs as well as two quantitative extensions of it stochastic Petri nets and continuous Petri nets. Each of these classes enjoys dedicated animation or simulation features. Our tool runs on Windows and Linux operating systems, and it is available free of charge for non-commercial use.