Technical Report 91-05-05, IG10, pages 1-79. Univ. of Washington, 1991.
Abstract: The authors present a parallel simulation protocol for performance Petri nets. Petri nets in which transition firings take randomly selected amounts of time. This protocol is interesting for two reasons. First, applications of standard conservative or optimistic parallel simulation to Petri nets results in either unneccessarily low (possibility no) parallelism or simply fails to produce correct results. Thus, this new protocol may be thought of as addressing a class of models not amenable to standard parallel simulation, with Petri net models being a particular example. Second, performance Petri nets are currently analyzed using numerical techniques that have time and space requirements exponential in the size of the net. Simulation, and particularly parallel simulation, is thus a practical alternate analysis method for these models, as shown by measurement of execution times.