CPN Tools is a tool for modeling, simulating, and analyzing colored Petri nets. The latest iteration of the tool, CPN Tools 4, extends this with constraints known from declarative languages such as Declare and DCR Graphs. Furthermore, this version introduces an explicit process perspective, powerful extensibility allowing third parties to extend the tools capabilities, and a visualization perspective making it possible to make high-level visualizations of executions directly in the tool. In our demonstration, we show how it is possible to create models incorporating declarative and imperative constructs and how to use these models to generate simulation logs that can be directly imported into ProM. We show off the new process perspective on top of colored Petri nets, exemplify the use of the perspective to generate readable Java code directly from models, and show how the visualization perspective makes it possible to show the formal underlying model alongside an easier-tograsp for non-experts high-level visualization. Our intended audience comprise current users of CPN Tools interested in recent developments and practitioners interested in colored Petri nets and hybrid models. We expect to tailor each demonstration to the wishes of the audience.
and less matured approach which has so far not found widespread application
in industry yet, however the two declarative languages Declare [
Hybrid modeling. Recently interest has emerged in hybrid approaches, where
some aspects of a process are specified directly using imperative constructs and
other aspects declaratively. This is useful if part of the process is well-structured
and part is more free, or for going from an abstract, little-understood process,
often modeled more naturally using declarative constraints, to a more concrete
implementation which by nature is often more imperative. One such hybrid
approach is implemented in CPN Tools 4 [
The model can be extended with time information and exercises to obtain
simulation-based performance information. It is also possible to obtain a
simulation log from CPN Tools, which can be imported directly into ProM 6.3
for analysis using a known process. CPN Tools also offers state-space analysis
for ensuring the absence of errors such as dead-locks in the process. For more
information about hybrid modeling, we refer the interested reader to [
PP-CPNs allow multiple instances of multiple process types to communicate, and hence supports an artifact-centric modeling style. Of course, classical Workflow Nets are recognized as PP-CPNs as one would expect. An example PP-CPN model of a simple producer/consumer system can be seen in Fig. 3 (top). Here, we have two kinds of processes communicating over a buffer place; producers produce items (integers), store them locally, and transmit them. They use a mutex (a single resource) to prevent race conditions. Initially there are two producers. Consumers receive data from producers, store it locally and dispatch depending on the data.
An advantage of PP-CPNs is that it is possible to generate them
automatically from code and to generate running Java code from such models; an example
of code generated from the model in Fig. 3 (top) is shown in Fig. 3 (bottom).
Maturity, availability, screencast. CPN Tools is a very mature tool and
has been in active use for over 10 years. It enjoyed approximately 5500
downloads in the period May 1, 2012–May 1, 2013. It is used in teaching in
several universities, used by companies, and a large number of case studies in
several fields are available from http://cs.au.dk/cpnets/industrial-use/
and on our own homepage we showcase models from industrial case studies at
http://cpntools.org/documentation/examples/. We are currently
conducting case studies using the new declarative constraints, but these are on-going
and not yet ready for publication. The implementation of the Declare language
is an optimized version of the Declare tool [
CPN Tools is open source and available for free for everybody at http://cpntools.org/. On this page, we also have a comprehensive getting started guide including screencasts for beginners. In the future, we plan to extend CPN Tools with timed and process-aware versions of Declare.