High-level petri nets based approach for designing and analyzing IoT systems

In the last decade, the Internet of Things (IoT) has emerged as a concept for intelligent systems that touch various areas of life, such as health, industry, smart cities, and many other fields. Failure of these systems can lead to catastrophic losses that affect people’s lives, the environment, health, and the economy. Therefore, it is necessary to analyze these IoT systems. However, the complexity of IoT systems makes modeling and analyzing these systems challenging. Formal verification methods offer a rigorous approach to analyzing and verifying complex systems by mathematically proving their correctness. This paper proposes a new approach based on high-level Petri nets (G-Nets) for designing and analyzing IoT systems. G-Nets support a modular or compositional methodology. Using a modular method in IoT development is particularly appropriate due to the inherently modular nature of IoT systems themselves. This approach addresses IoT challenges by offering essential benefits such as flexibility, scalability, ease of maintenance, reusability, and improved complexity management. However, the G-Nets formalism requires more specialized and sophisticated tools to verify and analyze its specifications. To bridge this gap, we propose and implement formal semantics for the G-Nets formalism using the Maude language. The Maude tools provide powerful analysis techniques that enable rigorous analysis and verification of G-Nets specifications. We illustrated our approach with a practical example of an IoT-based home camera system.