Integration of Time Petri Nets and TE-LOTOS in the design and evaluation of factory communication systems

Time Petri Nets (TPN) and TE-LOTOS are timed extensions of two commonly used specification formalisms, that can be used in the design of real time concurrent and distributed systems. The paper reviews the differences between the two extended formal description techniques (FDTs), and shows how they can be used jointly in the design and evaluation of real time communication systems such as those used in the factory environments. The joint use of the two formalisms that are considered, is supported by a mapping from Time Petri Nets to TE-LOTOS specifications which enables both embedding building blocks specified as TPNs into TE-LOTOS specifications, and applying the verification techniques and tools based on the algebraic structure of TE-LOTOS to TPNs. The mapping and the methodology are illustrated through an example: a PROFIBUS like system composed of three master stations is modelled by exploiting the features of both FDTs, thus obtaining a hybrid model which is then converted to a TE-LOTOS model of the whole system.