The Development of Complex Data Structures Using Object Enhanced Time Petri Nets

Abstract

The development of the complex data structures systems requires models that are capable of describing the systems’ requirements, design, verification, implementation and testing. This paper shows the development of such systems using Object Enhanced Time Petri Nets (OETPNs) framework. OETPN can model concurrency, reaction to internal and external events, synchronization and temporal behavior with fix and dynamic delays. OETPN keeps the bipartite graph structure of the classical Petri Nets, but the unique kind of tokens in PNs are changed to be any kind of objects to represent the data, or tasks (sub OETPN) that can either be active (i.e. threads of execution) or passive. OETPNs are capable to communicate with each other through input and output channels and to distribute concurrent tasks that are moved through a computer network with a dynamical structure (i.e. Task migration) without the need to stop the execution of the other OETPN. Guards and mappings are used to control the flow of execution in order to model the creation, insertion, modification and extraction of information of complex data structures. The mappings are also used to implement the information transformation and the placement of the resulted information at the output places of the transitions. The types of the places are specified to allow setting of objects or tasks. A new OETPN dynamic structure that is best suited for the server side is introduced. A Java platform that implement such applications is described and a complete system to manage the operations of the data structures is discussed with an example.