PIPE+ - A Modeling Tool for High Level Petri Nets

Petri nets are a formal, graphical and executable modeling technique for the specification and analys i of concurrent systems and have been widely applied in computer science and many other engineering disciplines. Low level Petri nets are simple and useful for modeling control flo ws; however, they are not powerful to define data and system fun ctionality. High level Petri nets were developed to support dat and functionality definitions [1]. To support the practical applications of Petri nets formalism, tools for designing and ex ecuting Petri nets are necessary. Although there are many existin g tools for supporting low level Petri nets [5], few tools are available for high level Petri nets. There is especially a lack of too ls to support high level Petri net notation proposed in the international standard [1]. In this paper, we present a tool, called PIPE+ , to support a subset of high level Petri nets proposed in [1]. PIE+ is built upon an existing low level Petri net tool PIPE (Pla tform Independent Petri Net Editor) [2]. This paper descr ibes the functionality of PIPE+ as well as illustrates the process of extending PIPE, which provides helpful insights for others to create Petri net tools suit their own needs. Furth ermore, PIPE+ is an open source tool and thus is available for va rious enhancements from worldwide research community.