Automatic composition of timed Petri net specifications for a real-time architecture

Ideally, a system's design starts with a formal model. However, in the real world, many systems are designed without a formal model in mind. For these systems, it is hard to show that a formal model meets the informal design. We demonstrate on the example of the composable message scheduled system (MSS) architecture how to bridge the gap between a rather informal description and a formal timed Petri net model. We discuss, how modeling can be done in a "natural" way, so that the mapping between system and model components and the composition of model components is rather obvious. Also, we introduce the tool MGen that support the automatic generation of Petri net models for the MSS architecture.