CPN Centre at University of Aarhus
The Danish National Centre for IT Research (CIT) and the University of Aarhus (AU) have established a Centre-of-Excellence within modelling, validation, and capacity planning of concurrent and distributed systems. The centre cooperates with research units in leading IT companies such as Nokia, Microsoft, Ericsson and Hewlett-Packard. The centre is located in the new IT-park in Katrinebjerg, Aarhus, Denmark and it constitutes one of the strongest groups for industrial use of formal methods. The centre has existed since the end of 1997 and the staff now encompasses more than 15 people. From the beginning of 2002 the CPN Centre is part of Center for Pervasive Computing.
Most modern computing systems are distributed, and a current trend is
that they become more and more pervasive. A common property of these
systems is that they are extremely complex to design, debug, and
maintain. One way to cope with this challenge is to test and further
develop the different design proposals by creating a number of
models/prototypes which can be manipulated and executed in a
computer. In this way it becomes possible to investigate how the
system design works before the implementation starts. The result is an
improved understanding of key design issues, fewer design errors,
faster implementation, better documentation, and easier maintenance.
Coloured Petri Nets (CP-nets or CPNs) provide a framework for the construction and analysis of concurrent and distributed systems. CP-nets have a wide range of application areas and many CPN projects have been carried out in the industry.
The work within the CPN centre focuses on three main areas:
- Design and analysis of communication protocols and other kinds of distributed systems,
- Performance analysis and capacity planning,
- Tools, algorithms, and techniques to support the two areas above.
Last modified: Thu May 1 15:49:34 2003 -- CP-nets Webmaster