Teaching real-time systems using Petri nets

Abstract concepts and complex methods can usually be understood more easily if some grapho-analytical techniques are used. Real-time systems (RTSs) include a wide variety of concepts, such as concurrency, parallelism and synchronization, and methods for specification, design, verification, implementation, etc., that have to be connected together. For this reason, the use of Petri nets is proposed in this paper as a link between graphical representation and analytical methods, in order to give some tools for achieving the software life-cycle.