A Petri Net based Environment for the Design of Event-driven Interfaces

Modern window-based user interfaces are actually a special kind of reactive system, and Petri nets may be fruitfully used to design such user computer dialogues. This paper describes a software engineering tool aimed at supporting the use of high-level Petri nets for the specification, design and implementation of user interfaces in an event-driven interface system. We assess the rationale for the use of Petri nets in such a perspective. We then detail the object-oriented software architecture of the environment, and present an original algorithm for interpreting high-level Petri nets in an event-driven environment. Key-words : User Interface, Design, Computer tools for nets, High-level Petri nets.