Integrating Heterogeneous Communication Support in Model-Driven Development of Petri nets based Distributed Controllers

The development of distributed embedded controllers can be significantly enhanced by adopting a model-driven development approach benefiting from the adoption of low-code strategies, where Petri net-based modeling can support rigorous system specification, verification, automatic code generation and direct deployment. This paper presents a development flow where, starting from the global system model expressed through an IOPT Petri net model, a decomposition strategy allow to obtain a set of concurrent sub-models. These sub-models are associated with different time domains in terms of execution time and deployed into a set of networked controllers. Several common protocols can be selected to support inter-controller communication ensuring synchronization between the networked controllers, namely I2C, UART and TCP/MQTT. The model-driven development approach is supported by the IOPT-Tools framework, a web-based platform freely available at http://gres.uninova.pt/IOPT-Tools/.