Translating TPAL specifications into timed-arc Petri nets

It is well known that Petri nets are a very suitable model for the description and analysis of concurrent systems, and several timed extensions of PNs have been defined to specify the behaviour of systems including time restrictions. But some software designers still find it a little difficult to work directly with Petri nets, specially when dealing with large systems, and they prefer to work with a formalism closer to a programming language, such as algebraic specification languages. Our goal, then, in this paper is to present an automatic translation of specifications written in a (timed) algebraic language (TPAL) into a timed model of Petri nets (Timed-Arc Petri nets). In this task we try to exploit as far as possible the special characteristics of Timed-Arc Petri nets, more specifically the presence of dead tokens, which allows us to extend in some particular cases the classical translations.