Inheritance Modeling in Distributed Object-Oriented Design: An Extended G-Nets Model

The emergence of an object-oriented paradigm has been beneficial for complex software development, and this paradigm has been used to develop architectures for distributed systems. Many object-oriented architectures have been suggested for developing object-based software, and several attempts have been made to specify object behaviors formally. Nevertheless, investigations into bridging the gap between object implementation and object formal models are limited. This paper presents a formal approach to designing and implementing object-oriented software. Rather than applying formal methods only in the specification phase, the proposed model applies formal methods in the design phase that extends the well–known–net formalism (abstract Petri nets) to support system modeling as a set of independent and low-coupled modules. This paper describes the extension of standard G-nets to model class and inheritance in true parallel object-oriented design and incorporates the inheritance mechanism in G-nets. This paper investigates the problems related to inheritance anomaly in designing distributed object-oriented to analyze the proposed model. Consequently, the proposed formalism formally and explicitly models the inheritance in the G-net to preserve the basic Petri net model and exploit the Petri net tools for analyzing and simulating concurrent object-oriented design. An example is given to illustrate a detailed analysis of the proposed formalism; however, real experimental research is required to validate the practical significance of the presented approach.