Rapid prototyping of parallel and distributed systems by means of high-level Petri nets

The control flow of parallel or distributed application can be specified by means of high-level Petri nets. One of the aims of rapid prototyping is to provide a validation of the specification; another is to produce a real application code which can be used in the final implementation. We restrict our considerations in this paper to the first goal only. When high-level Petri nets are involved, such as colored Petri nets, then colored linear invariants contribute to map automatically a set of processes on a specific parallel architecture. The purpose of this paper is to present the state of the art of the prototyping methodology and to illustrate it with a suitable example.