Formal model-driven executable DSLsApplication to Petri-nets

One of the promising techniques to address the dependability of a system is to apply, at early design stages, domain-specific languages (DSLs) with execution semantics. Indeed, an executable DSL would not only represent the expected system’s structure, but it is intended to itself behave as the system should run. In order to make executable DSLs a powerful asset in the development of safety-critical systems, not only a rigorous development process is required but the domain expert should also have confidence in the execution semantics provided by the DSL developer. To this aim, we recently developed the Meeduse tool and showed how to bridge the gap between MDE and a proof-based formal approach. In this work, we apply our approach to the Petri-net DSL and we present MeeNET, a proved Petri-net designer and animator powered by Meeduse. MeeNET is built on top of PNML (Petri-Net Markup Language), the international standard ISO/IEC 15909 for Petri-nets, and provides underlying formal static and dynamic semantics that are verified by automated reasoning tools. This paper first presents simplified MDE implementations of Petri-nets applying Java, QVT, Kermeta and fUML that we experimented in order to debug a safety-critical system and summarises the lessons learned from this study. Then, it provides formal alternatives, based on the B method and process algebra, which are well-established techniques allowing interactive animation on the one hand and reasoning about the behaviour correctness, on the other hand.