Introduction to the PEP system

The PEP system (Programming Environment based on Petri Nets) is a Petri net tool, and much more. PEP supports the most important tasks of a good net tool, including high-level and low-level net editing with comfortable simulation facilities. In addition, Petri net editing and simulation is embedded in sophisticated programming and verification components.

The programming component allows the user to design concurrent algorithms in an easy to use imperative language, and the PEP system then generates Petri nets from such programs. The simulation of a Petri net can even trigger the simulation of the corresponding program.

The PEP tool's comprehensive verification components allow the analysis of a large range of properties of parallel systems which can be checked efficiently on either programs or their corresponding nets. This includes user-defined properties specified by temporal logic formulae as well as specific properties for which dedicated algorithms have been implemented.

The PEP tool can be considered as an open platform. Further algorithms can be integrated in the user interface very easy. PEP has been implemented on Solaris 2.4, Sun OS 4.1.3 and Linux.