Combining data-flows and petri nets for cyber-physical systems specification

Abstract

This paper proposes a new modeling formalism for the specification of cyber-physical systems, combining the functionality offered by Petri nets and synchronous data flows. Petri nets have been traditionally used to model the behavior of reactive systems, whose state evolves depending on the interaction with external events. On the opposite, data-flow formalisms have been used predominantly to describe data-driven systems that produce output data through mathematical transformations applied to input signals. The proposed formalism covers both kinds of problems, offering support for the design of mixed systems containing linear control and signal processing operations along with event driven elements. Model composition using multiple components communicating through input and output signals and events, enable the implementation of distributed cyber-physical systems. The new formalism and the respective execution semantics are presented, with special attention to the bidirectional interaction between Petri net elements and data-flow nodes.