Design of parallel and distributed systems with high-level Petri nets using CASE technology

The purpose of this paper is to share multi-year educational experiences in application of a modern CASE system called Design/CPN/sup TM/ from Meta Software Corp. in a design and development of a parallel and distributed software using a visual programming methodology of a Petri net model. We put emphasis on understanding of fundamental concepts and on their applications to specification and design of software using colored Petri nets. The paper contains a description of a course contents with project assignments explored over a several years period. The material presented here is based on the elective graduate course topics on parallel computations taught at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.