Modelling Local and Global Behaviour: Petri Nets and Event Coordination

Today, it is possible to generate major parts of a software system from models. Most of the generated code, however, concerns the structural parts of the software; the code that concerns the actual functionality or behaviour of the software system is often still programmed manually. In order to address this problem, we developed the notation of coordination diagrams, which allows us to define the global behaviour of a software system on top of existing class diagrams. One of the major objectives of coordination diagrams was to make it easy to integrate them and the code generated from them with existing structural models, with existing code, and with other behavioural models. Basically, coordination diagrams define how the local behaviour of the individual parts of the software is coordinated with each other. The main concepts of coordination diagrams and their semantics are stabilising now: We call it the Event Coordination Notation (ECNO).