In: Proc. 3-rd IEEE Annual Int. Computer Performance and Dependability Symposium (IPDS'98), 7-9 September 1998, Durham, NC, pages 184-194. 1998.
Also in: Performance Evaluation, Vol. 35, No. 3-4, pages 145-169. 1999.
Abstract: In a distributed process control system, information about the behavior of physical processes is usually collected and stored in a real-time database which can be remotely accessed by human operators. This paper proposes an analytical approach to compute the response time distribution of operator consoles in a distributed process control environment. The developed technique is based on Markov regenerative processes and is described with the assistance of deterministic and stochastic Petri nets. Exact models are constructed for performance analysis of centralized and decentralized database architectures. However, due to limitations on the exact solution, an approximate solution is also proposed which is then used to study response time distributions of large systems.
Keywords: Markov regenerative processes, deterministic Petri nets, distributed real-time databases, performance analysis, stochastic Petri nets.