Using Colored Petri Nets and Tools to Support Mobile Terminal and Network Software Development

In this paper we report our experience in several research projects that use Colored Petri Nets in modeling and analysis of the software systems of Nokia products. These research projects use both formal language – Colored Petri Nets and semi-formal language – UML to describe, model and analyze different software systems. Due to the particular limitations, formal methods have been only used to model and analyze a certain property or a few strongly related properties, or a certain critical part of a big system at a time. This short paper reports our experience in applying formal methods in industry settings. We mainly address our problems in applying formal methods in supporting our product software development, such as system complexity, model complexity, the appropriate abstraction levels of a formal model, tracing the problem from abstract formal model to real software and vice versa, tool support, etc.