Pragmatics Annotated Coloured Petri Nets for Protocol Software Generation and Verification

Abstract. PetriCode is a tool that supports automated generation of protocol software from a restricted class of Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) called Pragmatics Annotated Coloured Petri Nets (PA-CPNs). PetriCode and PA-CPNs have been designed with five main requirements in mind, which include the same model being used for verification and code generation. The PetriCode approach has been discussed and evaluated in earlier papers already. In this paper, we give a formal definition of PA-CPNs and demonstrate how the specific structure of PA-CPNs can be exploited for verification purposes

Model-based development for MAC protocols in industrial wireless sensor networks

Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) is an approach for design and implementation of software applications, that can be applied across multiple domains. The advantages include rapid prototyping and implementation, along with reduction in errors induced by humans in the process, via automation. Wireless Sensor Actuator Networks (WSANs) rely on resource-constrained hardware and have platform-specific implementations. Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in particular are mainly responsible for radio communication, the biggest consumer of energy, and are also responsible for Quality of Service (QoS). The design and development of protocols for WSAN could benefit from the use of MDSE. In this article, we use Coloured Petri Nets (CPN) for platform independent modeling of protocols, initial verification, and simulation. The PetriCode tool is used to generate platform-specific implementations for multiple platforms, including MiXiM for simulation and TinyOS for deployment. Further the generated code is analyzed via network simulations and real-world deployment test. Through the process of MDSE-based code generation and analysis, the protocol design is validated, verified and analyzed. We use the GinMAC protocol as a running example to illustrate the design and development life cycle.publishedVersionnivå

Profiling the publish/subscribe paradigm for automated analysis using colored Petri nets

UML sequence diagrams are used to graphically describe the message interactions between the objects participating in a certain scenario. Combined fragments extend the basic functionality of UML sequence diagrams with control structures, such as sequences, alternatives, iterations, or parallels. In this paper, we present a UML profile to annotate sequence diagrams with combined fragments to model timed Web services with distributed resources under the publish/subscribe paradigm. This profile is exploited to automatically obtain a representation of the system based on Colored Petri nets using a novel model-to-model (M2M) transformation. This M2M transformation has been specified using QVT and has been integrated in a new add-on extending a state-of-the-art UML modeling tool. Generated Petri nets can be immediately used in well-known Petri net software, such as CPN Tools, to analyze the system behavior. Hence, our model-to-model transformation tool allows for simulating the system and finding design errors in early stages of system development, which enables us to fix them at these early phases and thus potentially saving development costs

A Dual-Mode Adaptive MAC Protocol for Process Control in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

Doktorgradsavhandling ved Fakultet for teknologi og realfag, Universitetet i Agder, 2017Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) consist of sensors and actuators operating together to provide monitoring and control services. These services are used in versatile applications ranging from environmental monitoring t oindustrial automation applications. Industrial Wireless Sensor Network (IWSN) is a sub domain of the WSN domain, focussing the industrial monitoring and automation applications. The IWSN domain differs from the generic WSN domains in terms of its requirements. General IWSN requirements include: energy efficiency and quality of service, and strict requirements are imposed on the quality of service expected by IWSN applications. Quality of service in particular relates to reliability, robustness, and predictability. Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in an IWSN solution are responsible for managing radio communications, the main consumer of power in every IWSN element. With proper measures, MAC protocols can provide energy efficient solutions along with required quality of service for process control applications. The first goal of the thesis was to assess the possibility of creating a MAC protocol exploiting properties of the application domain, the process control domain. This resulted in the creation of the Dual-Mode Adaptive Medium Access Control Protocol (DMAMAC) which constitutes the main contribution of this thesis. The DMAMAC protocol is energy efficient,while preserving real-time requirements, and is robust to packet failure. This has been guaranteed by the thorough evaluation of the protocol via simulation, verification, and implementation with deployment testing. In parallel, we also investigated the possibility of using an alternative development approach for MAC protocols. Specifically, we have proposed a development approach based on MAC protocol model in CPN tools. The development approach consists of automatic code generation for the MiXiM simulation tool and the TinyOS platform. We used the related GinMAC protocol as a running example for the development approach. The generated code for MiXiM simulation platform and the TinyOS implementation platform are evaluated via simulation and deployment respectively. This results in a faster design to implementation time, and closely related protocol artifacts, improving on the traditional approach

Workshop proceedings of the 1st workshop on quality in modeling

Quality assessment and assurance constitute an important part of software engineering. The issues of software quality management are widely researched and approached from multiple perspectives and viewpoints. The introduction of a new paradigm in software development – namely Model Driven Development (MDD) and its variations (e.g., MDA [Model Driven Architecture], MDE [Model Driven Engineering], MBD [Model Based Development], MIC [Model Integrated Computing]) – raises new challenges in software quality management, and as such should be given a special attention. In particular, the issues of early quality assessment, based on models at a high abstraction level, and building (or customizing the existing) prediction models for software quality based on model metrics are of central importance for the software engineering community. The workshop is continuation of a series of workshops on consistency that have taken place during the subsequent annual UML conferences and recently MDA-FA. The idea behind this workshop is to extend the scope of interests and address a wide spectrum of problems related to MDD. It is also in line with the overall initiative of the shift from UML to MoDELS. The goal of this workshop is to gather researchers and practitioners interested in the emerging issues of quality in the context of MDD. The workshop is intended to provide a premier forum for discussions related to software quality and MDD. And the aims of the workshop are: - Presenting ongoing research related to quality in modeling in the context of MDD, - Defining and organizing issues related to quality in the MDD. The format of the workshop consists of two parts: presentation and discussion. The presentation part is aimed at reporting research results related to quality aspects in modeling. Seven papers were selected for the presentation out of 16 submissions; the selected papers are included in these proceedings. The discussion part is intended to be a forum for exchange of ideas related to understanding of quality and approaching it in a systematic way