Automatic Code Generation of Petri Net-Based Business Process Models

Abstract

To verify software system flows and different components before the implementation of the system formal modeling techniques become very useful. Modeling helps users to understand software systems better by defining the system’s components formally. Many mathematical modeling languages are used for this purpose but the widely used language for formal modeling is Petri Nets. Traditionally all the efforts involved in the modeling phase is nothing more than to support the documentation because the development process manual transfer the modeling into implementation which because information lost is the real system implementation (program Code Generation). To reduce the implementation and modeling gap Model-Driven Software Engineering (MDSE) plays a very crucial role as MDSE approaches favor code generation from models which helps to improve productivity, quality of the application and reduce the time spent on implementation. As code generation is the fundamental part of the MDSE and model play a key role that is why tool support proposed in this thesis work tool provides a modeling interface and an approach to generate code from Petri net in multiple high-level programming languages such as Python, C, C++, Java, etc. Through the use of modeling interface, four models have created these models were used to generate code and the tool successfully generated code in multiple high-level programming languages which can be compiled and run-on supportive IDEs. However, the proposed tool had flaws in the modeling such as the CTRL+ key sometimes misses the draw arc operation, and code generated from complex models has logical flaws. The proposed tool can be useful in future research work for providing support to extend the code generation approach, and modeling interface to modeled other domain’s model which based on another formal modeling also to support the other informal modeling languages such as UML class diagram, etc. and help to generate code.