TAPAAL is a tool for

• modelling, simulation and verification of
• Timed-Arc Petri nets
• developed at Department of Computer Science at AALborg University in Denmark

and available for Linux, Windows and Mac OS X platforms.

Timed-Arc Petri Net (TAPN) is a time extension of the classical Petri net model (a commonly used graphical model of distributed computations introduced by Carl Adam Petri in his disseration in 1962). The time extension we consider allows for explicit treatment of real-time, which is associated with the tokens in the net (each tokens has its own age) and arcs from places to transitions are labelled by time intervals that restrict the age of tokens that can be used in order to fire the respective transition. In TAPAAL tool a furter extension of this model with invariants on places and with transport arcs (which are more expressive than for example previously considered read-arcs) is implemented.

The TAPAAL tool offers a graphical editor for drawing TAPN models, simulator for experimenting with the designed nets and a verification environment that automatically answers logical queries formulated in a subset of CTL logic (essentially EF, EG, AF, AG formulae without nesting). It also allows the user to check whether a given net is k-bounded for a given number k. The verification algorithm translates the TAPAAL queries into UPPAAL ones and relies on the UPPAAL verification engine, but the user does not have to leave the TAPAAL GUI during any phase of the model verification and error traces are displayed directly in TAPAAL.