ON THE ENHANCEMENT OF TIMED PETRI NET THEORY AND ITS APPLICATIONS TO SOME ASPECTS OF COMPUTER SYSTEMS

Abstract

This thesis is an attempt towards the development of an enhanced Petrinet, namely the Advanced Petrinet (APN). The development of Petrinets and its popular extensions to a much more easy, convenient, modelling and analytical tool, over and above their originally existing capabilities, is the primary objective of this dissertation. Better availability and convenience in the modelling and analytical capability is facilitated through the proposal of some new primitives to the basic Petrinet elements. The enhancements are supported with new and efficient analysis techniques. The reachability tree and matrix equation, which are the popular analysis techniques of conventional nets, have been extended and modified suitably to reflect the features of APN. Special emphasis has been given to time-based analysis techniques for the APN. A new time characteristic equation has been derived to provide a direct mechanism through which performance evaluation of APN models can be conveniently carried out, giving the total execution time of systems modelled by the net. The APN has been found to be amenable for application in wide-ranging areas like: Flexible manufacturing systems, Supercomputer architectures, Computer communication systems and networks, Computer controlled data acquisition systems, Process control systems, etc.