Renew 2.5 – Towards a comprehensive integrated development environment for Petri net-based applications

Abstract

RENEW (The Reference Net Workshop) is an extensible Petri net IDE that supports the development and execution of high-level Petri nets and other modeling techniques. The Reference net formalism – the major formalism for RENEW – includes concepts such as net instances, synchronous channels and seamless Java integration. It combines the advantages of Petri nets and object-oriented programming for the development of concurrent and distributed software systems. Modeling support of RENEW focuses on convenience and ease for Petri net development. An outstanding feature is the support for multi-formalism simulation. The plugin architecture of RENEW enables the developers to extend the IDE for instance with additional formalisms. Alternatively to the inline mode – within the graphical user interface – the Simulator can also be run in a headless server fashion. Several configurations of RENEW are available, which are constituted through selections of plugins providing specialized functionality for multiple platforms. In this manner the RENEW family constitutes a product line architecture. RENEW is available free of charge including the Java source code. In this contribution we provide information about RENEW’S functionality and architecture as well as the development of the tool set over the last decade.