Stochastic Petri Net Simulation

Petri nets are a formal modelling tool very well suited to the description of distributed and concurrent systems which exhibit synchronization and contention for shared resources. Adding random temporal specifications to Petri nets, stochastic Petri nets are obtained from which event driven simulators can be automatically constructed. This paper discusses the double role that stochastic Petri net simulation plays as an aid in the debugging of the correctness of the model and as a vehicle for the evaluation of the efficiency of the system. A modelling tool that has been developed for these purposes is illustrated with an emphasis on the modelling environment it provides and on its internal software architecture.