Object-oriented behaviour modelling for real-time design

The commonly recognised weakness of modern object oriented design and implementation methodologies lies in their superficial treatment of inter object dynamics. The paper addresses the problem of behaviour modelling by suggesting utilisation of the concept of high level Petri nets to model object interactions. The Petri net representation creates an additional access layer of object architecture, providing a meta level object control with the sequencing of method execution. It is argued that the two layer object view presented allows one, both mathematically and pragmatically, to achieve a more precise and flexible description of inter object dynamics. The usefulness of the approach is demonstrated by some illustrative examples.