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Abstract
Distributed systems engineering is a challenging process. When specifying, modeling, and analyzing the behavior of such systems, special care needs to be taken to support features like concurrency, non-determinism, and asynchronous way of communication. Formal specification languages and models help to provide clear and unambiguous descriptions of such inherent qualities. A plethora of models exist just for this purpose. However, they are not widely accepted, especially in the industry, as most of them require considerable mathematical expertise. Furthermore, tool support for these models is very limited and in most cases proprietary. In this thesis, we address the above issues by presenting a hybrid modeling method based on UML 2.0 component model and Colored Petri nets. The component model defines the structural topology of the system and the Colored Petri nets provide a platform to formally specify system behavior in terms of component interface and interaction protocols. To support our methodology we have developed a modeling framework, DiSyNer, which can be used for both specifying and analyzing distributed system models. We illustrate the effectiveness of the method using examples.