Specification of Complex Events and Their Integration in the IOPT-Tools Development Environment

Controllers for discrete-event systems are typically designed using formalisms such as state diagrams and Petri nets. These formalisms rely heavily on the concept of events, which can represent anything from a simple change in signal value to more complex behavioral evolutions of signals. Modeling strategies including events allow model compactness and expressiveness. In this paper, a review on different types of input and output events associated with Boolean and multi-valued signals is presented. This paper presents their integration in the IOPT-Tools development environment, which uses a specific class of Petri nets for system’s modeling, the Input-Output Place-Transition nets (IOPT-nets). The IOPT-Tools development environment, accessible for free at http://gres.uninova.pt/IOPT-Tools/, offers a comprehensive environment enabling model creation and editing through the model editor, as well as testing and validation via tools such as the simulator and state space construction. Additionally, it supports the automatic execution code generation of these models (using C and VHDL) allowing the direct deployment on different types of platforms. The paper presents specific interfaces allowing the definition of complex events characteristics in the IOPT-Tools development environment and their usage in the context of discrete-event controllers development.