Generating Protocol Software from CPN Models Annotated with Pragmatics

Model-driven software engineering (MDSE) provides a foundation for automatically generating software based on models that focus on the problem domain while abstracting from the details of underlying implementation platforms. Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) have been widely used to formally model and verify protocol software, but limited work exists on using CPN models of protocols as a basis for automated code generation.

The contribution of this paper is a method for generating protocol software from a class of CPN models annotated with code generation pragmatics. Our code generation method consists of three main steps: automatically adding so-called derived pragmatics to the CPN model, computing an abstract template tree, which associates pragmatics with code templates, and applying the templates to generate code which can then be compiled.

We illustrate our method using a unidirectional data framing protocol.