Implementing compositionality for stochastic Petri nets

An implementation of compositionality for stochastic well-formed nets (SWN) and, consequently, for generalized stochastic Petri nets (GSPN) has been recently included in the GreatSPN tool. Given two SWNs and a labelling function for places and transitions, it is possible to produce a third one as a superposition of places and transitions of equal label. Colour domains and arc functions of SWNs have to be treated appropriately. The main motivation for this extension was the need to evaluate a library of fault-tolerant "mechanisms" that have been recently defined, and are now under implementation, in a European project called TIRAN. The goal of the TIRAN project is to devise a portable software solution to the problem of fault tolerance in embedded systems, while the goal of the evaluation is to provide evidence of the efficacy of the proposed solution. Modularity being a natural "must" for the project, we have tried to reflect it in our modelling effort. In this paper, we discuss the implementation of compositionality in the GreatSPN tool, and we show its use for the modelling of one of the TIRAN mechanisms, the so-called local voter. © Springer-Verlag 2001.