In: Proceedings of the 2003 IEEE International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS-2003), pages 143-155. March 2003. This contribution received the Best-Paper-Award at ISPASS-2003.
Abstract: In this paper we show how Queueing Petri Net (QPN) models can be exploited for performance analysis of distributed e-business systems. We study a real-world application and demonstrate the benefits, in terms of modelling power and expressiveness, that QPN models provide over conventional modelling paradigms such as Queueing Networks and Petri Nets. As shown, QPNs facilitate the integration of both hardware and software aspects of system behavior in the same model. In addition to hardware contention and scheduling strategies, using QPNs one can easily model simultaneous resource possession, synchronization, blocking and contention for software resources. By validating the models presented through measurements, we show that they are not just powerful as a specification mechanism, but are also very powerful as a performance analysis and prediction tool. However, currently available tools and techniques for QPN analysis are limited.
Keywords: Queueing Petri nets; performance modeling; performance prediction; e-business.