Simulation and Analysis of a Document Storage System

The paper discusses the modeling and simulation of a Document Storage system using colored Petri nets and the Design/CPN tool. The system modeled is part of a system which is capable of managing and delivering documents in the range of 20 million up to 30 million documents. This corresponds to a storage capacity of 10 TB up to 15 TB. The 660 concurrent users working with the system request about 10,000 documents within one hour. The goal of this project was to develop a model of the critical parts of the system in order to identify bottlenecks and to find the right scaled hardware configuration. Special modeling techniques are needed in order to process such a large number of tokens i.e. user requests.