A Visual Editor for Reconfigurable Object Nets based on the ECLIPSE Graphical Editor Framework

The main idea behind Reconfigurable Object Nets (RONs) is the integration of transition firing and rule-based net structure transformation of place/transition nets during system simulation. RONs are high-level nets with two types of tokens: object nets (place/transition nets) and net transformation rules (a dedicated type of graph transformation rules). Firing of high-level transitions may involve firing of object net transitions, transporting object net tokens through the high-level net, and applying net transformation rules to object nets. Net transformations include net modifications such as merging or splitting of object nets, and net refinement. This approach increases the expressiveness of Petri nets and is especially suited to model mobile distributed processes. The paper presents a visual editor for RONs which has been developed in a student project at TU Berlin in summer 2007. The visual editor itself has been realized as a plug-in for ECLIPSE using the ECLIPSE Modeling Framework (EMF) and Graphical Editor Framework (GEF) plug-ins.