Relationship between Simulink and Petri nets

Matlab/Simulink is an industrial tool that is widely used to design and validate control algorithms for embedded control systems using numerical simulation. A Simulink model of a control system typically defines one or more control algorithms together with their environment. Such models exhibit both discrete and continuous dynamics, simulated by discretizing time. On the other hand, a colored Petri net (CPN) is a well known formalism for modeling behavior of discrete event systems. In this paper, we give a formal semantics to Simulink using the CPN formalism, by describing how Simulink models can be expressed as a CPN. We also show how Petri nets can be simulated in Simulink. Finally, we show how a CPN model can be used for performance analysis of a Simulink model.