Peer Reviewed Journal via three different mandatory reviewing processes, since 2006, and, from September 2020, a fourth mandatory peer-editing has been added.
This paper describes the use of Petri nets in a suit of tools to
design, analyze, monitor, log and debug the run-time
coordination of distributed control systems. The interaction
between the distributed components is modeled using Petri
nets. Before running the application, different Petri net analysis
tools can be used to analyze the system. While running,
interactions between the different components of the
distributed system can be easily monitored watching the
evolution of the different Petri nets. Besides monitoring, the
system can be instrumented to log state changes with different
levels of detail. Finally, graphical tools can be used for
visualizing the evolution of the system step by step or at the
same running pace. These tools allow also go to a specific point
of the execution and visualize the state of the global system.
