IOPT-tools — Towards cloud design automation of digital controllers with Petri nets

This paper describes the IOPT-Tools cloud-based tool-chain, offering a complete set of Petri net tools with a Web interface supporting digital controllers development. The tools include an interactive graphical Petri net editor, a model-checking subsystem composed of a state-space generator, state-space visualization and a query system, and automatic code generation tools that produce software “C” code or VHDL hardware descriptions ready to be deployed into implementation platforms. All interactive tools are executed directly in the user's Web Browser using AJAX principles, but file-storage and intensive processing operations are processed in the cloud. For example, state-space computation and the storage of the resulting data is performed in dedicated fast servers, minimizing network traffic and enabling the use of lightweight terminal equipment to access the tools, as simple as smart-phones or tablet computers. The tools are available on-line at http://gres.uninova.pt.