EZPetri: A Petri net interchange framework for Eclipse based on PNML

Petri net community has suffered with the lack of a standard format to represent Petri net models. This situation led to an undesirable tool incompatibility. In order to solve this drawback, the PNML has been proposed. PNML is an interchange file format for Petri nets based on XML. This paper presents a framework, called EZPetri, based on PNML. The EZPetri framework is a perspective of the Eclipse platform. The union of Eclipse and PNML has demonstrated to be an effective instrument for integrating Petri net tools and applications. The paper discusses the principles of the EZPetri framework, and presents three applications integrated into the EZPetri framework: software power estimation; A SystemC model for Petri nets ; and hard real-time software synthesis. Such applications have been developed with no knowledge about EZPetri. This is a demonstration of the integration facilities provided by EZPetri. The framework is a fertile ground for combining existing of Petri net tools and applications into a single environment, offering Petri net community a new perspective of integration.