Structural translation from Time Petri Nets to Timed Automata

In this paper, we consider Time Petri Nets (TPN) where time is associated with transitions. We give a formal semantics for TPNs in terms of Timed Transition Systems. Then, we propose a translation from TPNs to Timed Automata (TA) that preserves the behavioral semantics (timed bisimilarity) of the TPNs. For the theory of TPNs this result is twofold: (i) reachability problems and more generally TCTL model-checking are decidable for bounded TPNs; (ii) allowing strict time constraints on transitions for TPNs preserves the results described in (i). The practical applications of the translation are: (i) one can specify a system using both TPNs and Timed Automata and a precise semantics is given to the composition; (ii) one can use existing tools for analyzing timed automata (like Kronos, Uppaal or Cmc) to analyze TPNs. In this paper we describe the new feature of the tool Romeo that implements our translation of TPNs in the Uppaal input format. We also report on experiments carried out on various examples and compare the result of our method to state-of-the-art tool for analyzing TPNs.