Performance evaluation of concurrent systems using timed petri nets

It is shown that the behavior of Petri nets with exponentially distributed firing times can be represented by labeled directed “state” graphs in which labels describe the probabilities of transitions between vertices of the graph. For bounded Petri nets the corresponding state graphs are finite, and are isomorphic to finite state Markov chains, stationary descriptions can thus be obtained by standard techniques. An immediate application of such a model is performance analysis of concurrent systems, and in particular queueing systems with exponentially distributed arrival and service times. A simple example of an interactive computer system model is used as an illustration of performance evaluation.