Petri Nets Modeling for the Schedulability Analysis of Industrial Real Time Systems

In the experience of a railway signaling manufacturer, schedulability analysis takes an important portion of the time dedicated to configure a complex, generic, real-time application into a specifically customized signalling embedded application. We report on an approach aimed at substituting possibly unreliable and costly empirical measures with rigorous analysis. The analysis is done resorting to modeling the scheduling algorithms by Petri Nets. We have compared two types of Petri Nets: Timed Petri Nets (TPN) and Coloured Petri Nets (CPN), supported by open source tools, respectively TINA and CPN Tools 4.0 concluding that the latter are more suited for the dealt problem.