Reverse engineering with Petri nets

Abstract

With the emergence of Petri nets in practical applications the need to reverse-engineer them arises. Folding based reverse-engineering techniques are crucial for Petri nets. But after a translation step they offer novel analysis capabilities for other systems. Such a translation makes Petri nets a powerful and intuitive engineering metaphor outside their traditional strength for concurrency.We present a folding-based algorithm which transforms an unstructured flat net into a coloured net. In reverse engineering terms, it recovers a high-level design, a structured specification and a data model from an existing system. Both the algorithm and the translation to Petri nets allow many variations for adaptation to different tasks. Moreover, the cost is almost linear, thus ensuring scalability.