In: International Journal in Compution Simulation 1, pages 153-168. 1991.
Abstract: The simulation facility of the Great SPN package for editing and analysis of timed and stockastic Petri nets is described. The software architecture of the simulation environment is based on the cooperation of a graphical editor for Petri nets with an event-driven simulation kernel. The simulator itself is made up of several cooperating processes, implementing a functional decomposition in a simulation engine generating the sequence of states, a simulation control responsible for the user interaction (the graphic interface), and two measurement modules that collect statistics. The system is developed on a powerful workstation, using the standard UNIX interprocess communication facilities. Interactive simulation with animation of graphical models can be exploited for model debugging, validation, and explanation. A non interactive simulation mode can also be used to collect performance estimates from timed Petri net models. The simulation kernel is optimized based on some structural properties of the underlying Petri net graph. In particular, the event list management is accelerated by an a priori analysis of the conflict and causal connection relations existing among transitions. An application to the evaluation of a complex multiprocessor model is included to illustrate the power of the tool for the study of multiprocessor computer architecture performance.