The Petri Net Markup Language: theory and practice

Advanced tutorial at Petri Nets 2009

Background

The Petri Net Markup Language (PNML) is an interchange format for Petri nets in general and for High-level Petri nets in particular. The PNML is currently under the final ballot as ISO/IEC Standard 15909-2. It will, hopefully, be approved as International Standard by June 2009.

Preliminary versions of PNML were presented at a Workshop at Petri Nets 2000 and Petri Nets 2003. Though the fundamental concepts of PNML have not changed since then, there have been many refinements, improvements, and extensions in order to meet different needs. With the final ballot of ISO/IEC 15909-2, the PNML will be stable now.

Objective & Contents

The objective of this advanced tutorial is to make the final version of PNML better known to a wider audience in the Petri net community and to help tool developers implement PNML support for their tools. To this end, the tutorial has two main parts:

• A theoretical part will cover the concepts of PNML and the corresponding XML syntax. The focus will be on the concepts and their formulation in terms of meta-models.
• A practical part will show how an existing tool can be extended for supporting PNML on the basis of the PNML Framework, which is a reference implementation of the standard to help tools developers in making their tools PNML conformant.

The tutorial will also provide a brief overview on the future perspectives of ISO/IEC 15909: Part 3, which will cover modularity and different versions of Petri nets. This way, participants of the tutorial will also be prepared to join some working sessions of the "Standardisation Group", which will probably be held informally during Petri Nets 2009.

Organisers

• Lom Hillah, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, France
  lom-messan [dot] hillah [at] lip6 [dot] fr
• Ekkart Kindler, Denmark's Technical University, Lyngby, Denmark
  eki [at] imm [dot] dtu [dot] dk>

Program

The schedule is : June 23, 2009, from 14:00 to 17:30. Two sessions will be held, and organized as follows :

• 14:00-15:30 PNML Concepts
  • Introduction and Overview
  • Main principles
  • Concepts and meta-models
  • XML Syntax
  • Outlook on future extensions (e.g., modularity and Petri net types)
• 15:30-16:00 Coffee break
• 16:00-17:30 PNML Framework
  • Motivation and goals
  • Provided services
  • Overview of the design and architecture
  • Hands-on (dependent on the audience, see below): Get a quick start using PNML Framework with an application example with PNML to dot transformation
  • Feedback
  • Closing

Particular dispositions

The registration for this tutorial is via the main conference site. See tutorial 4 (T4). As indicated in the program, part of the tutorial could be hands on, which means that we will do a practical application of the PNML Framework on your computer. In order to find out, how many participants are interested in that, please indicate your interest in the hands-on tutorial when registering for the workshop. Just email us after your registration for this tutorial.

In case that a majority of the participants is interested, we will do part of the tutorial hands-on. Then, in order not to loose time, you should have pre-installed the following software on your laptop (list may be updated):

• Java, at least version 5;
• the Eclipse Modeling Tools distribution;
• GraphViz.