Assessing the safety and the dependability of a system is one of the
systems engineer’s main targets. Formal tools, however powerful they
may be to meet these issues, are often too cumbersome and complex to
use. In this paper, we show that efficient formal methods can be used
on high-level models used in Systems Engineering to achieve some
verification and validation processes. We give an overview of ongoing
work on the translation of EFFBD-like models to time Petri nets, using
model transformation and meta-modeling. We also present some
encouraging results obtained with a prototype translation tool.