Analysing Product Lines of Concurrent Systems with Coloured Petri Nets

Petri nets are a popular formalism to model and analyse concurrent systems.They can be combined with software product lines to support the specification of concurrent system families, like variants of controllers, process models, or configurations of flexible assembly lines.Specifically, a Petri net product line (PNPL) comprises a (black and white) Petri net decorated with variability inscriptions, and a feature model controlling the derivation of admissible nets of the family.However, the derivable nets cannot be reconfigured at runtime, and the techniques to analyse properties of such reconfigurations are limited.To tackle these issues, we present a method to embed a PNPL into a standard Coloured Petri net.This embedding permits using the extensive simulation and analysis capabilities of powerful tools like CPN Tools, and enables the reconfiguration of the product nets at run-time.In this paper, we report on the translation of PNPLs into Coloured Petri nets, characterize the properties that can be analysed with this translation, and describe tool support on the basis of a case study in the area of flexible production systems.