Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences

Petri Nets have been successfully used to model and evaluate the performance of distributed systems. Several researchers have extended the basic Petri Net model to include time, and have demonstrated that restricted classes of Petri Nets can be analyzed efficiently. Unfortunately, the restrictions prohibit the techniques from being applied to many interesting systems, e.g. communication protocols. This paper proposes a version of timed Petri Nets which accurately models communication protocols, and which can be analyzed using Timed Reachability Graphs. Procedures for constructing and analyzing these graphs are presented. The analysis is shown to be applicable to a larger class of Timed Petri Nets than previously thought. The model and the analysis technique are demonstrated using a simple communication protocol.