Event-based communication styles are potential solutions for facilitating high flexibility, scalability, and concurrency of distributed systems due to the intrinsic loose coupling of the participants. However, software developers often find the event-driven communication style unintuitive, especially for large and complex systems with numerous constituting elements, because of its non-deterministic characteristics. In this paper, we propose a novel approach based on DERA---an event actor-based framework---which can be used to describe distributed event-based systems with reduced nondeterminism. DERA's graphical notations support representing a current snapshot of an event-based system closely to the intuitive perception of the developers. We propose a formal specification of the event actors-based constructs and the graphical notations based on Petri nets in order to enable formal analysis of such snapshots. Based on this, an automated translation from event actors-based constructs to Petri nets using template-based model transformation techniques is also developed. The applicability of our approach is shown through an industrial case study in the field of service platform integration.

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