Design of distributed systems using Petri nets: A graduate computer science course

This paper shares educational experiences in teaching design of distributed computing systems using Petri nets with application to engineering software for embedded systems. We put special emphasis on understanding of fundamental concepts and their applications to specification and design of distributed software systems using Colored Petri nets. The paper contains a description of lecture contents, a formulation of two project assignments, and topics of research papers, explored over a period of several years, on applications of Petri nets in software engineering. Timed and stochastic Petri nets are used to model real-time events and to evaluate computer systems' performance. The material is based partly on two graduate courses: CIS 525, Topics on Parallel Computations, and CIS 578, Performance Evaluation of Computer Systems, taught by the author during last several years at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. In both courses, Colored Petri nets play a significant and unifying role in systems' design.