Research and De­velop­ment of
Reactive Systems

The Bigraph Theory provides a rigorous yet practical foundation for modeling and reasoning about reactive systems. Building on this, the Bigraph Toolkit Suite (BTS) provides extensible tools for designing and verifying reactive, distributed architectures, spanning ubiquitous computing, IoT, cyber-physical systems, smart spaces, and beyond, complete with integrated model-checking capabilities.

Explore Toolkit Components Go to GitHub

Reactive System Theory — For Software Developers

BTS provides a general-purpose environment for modeling, simulating, and verifying bigraphical reactive systems. It supports developers to describe and verify mobile and distributed systems in a formal yet practical way by moving from design, analysis to execution.

  • Metamodeling – BTS defines a family of metamodels to ensure structural consistency, from high-level concepts to low-level execution details.
  • Interoperability – Platform-agnostic and implementation-independent, BTS supports rich toolchains and model exchange between many formats and frameworks.
  • Verification – The underlying model supports mathematical reasoning about parallel and reactive systems, enabling analysis of behaviors, safety properties, and optimizations.

Explore the Bi­graphical Tool­kit Suite

BTS, i.e., any of its constituents listed below, is licensed according to the terms of the Apache License, Version 2.0.

Visit the whole Bigraph Toolkit Suite at GitHub

Support

Project Template

Starter template (Gradle/Maven) to jumpstart Bigraph Framework projects.

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Tutorials

Hands-on Java tutorials for the Bigraph Framework.


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Bigraph Vending Machine (Java)

Java implementation of a bigraph-driven vending machine.

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Bigraph Vending Machine (Slides)

Explanatory slide set of the bigraphical vending machine.

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BiGGer (Slides)

Accompanying slide set explaining how to simulate bigraphs using GrGen.NET with the BiGGer tool.

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BDSL (User Manual)

The user manual of a bigraphical domain-specific language.


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Different Paths, One Goal

BTS unifies diverse modeling and programming approaches through a single, shared metamodel. This common foundation ensures seamless interoperability, no matter which approach is chosen.

  • Uniform XMI Representation – All bigraph instances use the XMI standard for XML-based metadata exchange, ensuring seamless interoperability across every API.
  • Intuitive Visual Modeling – Interactive tools make creating and editing bigraphs more straightforward and accessible.
  • Powerful Java API – The Bigraph Framework delivers more flexibility through a programmatic interface.

Combine

BTS APIs span multiple levels of abstraction for building bigraphical models and programs, which are fully interoperable. Applications are never locked into a single abstraction: multiple abstractions can be seamlessly combined to harness their collective strengths.

"Both the kind and granularity of a problem suggest the tools to best work with in order to solve the problem."