Applications of coloured petri nets for functional validation of protocol designs

Abstract

Communication protocols constitute central building blocks in most modern IT systems as they define components, rules, and languages that make data communication possible. The development of correct protocols is a challenging engineering discipline, making modelling and validation of protocol design an important application domain for Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs). We illustrate the practical application of CPNs for protocol validation by focusing on selected aspects of four recent projects involving industrial-sized protocols. These projects demonstrate how CPNs can be used to model protocol elements and improve protocol specifications, how state space exploration can be used to verify protocol properties, and how behavioural visualisation in combination with a CPN model provides an effective way of rapidly constructing an executable prototype of a protocol design. © Springer-Verlag 2013.