Bindings in colored petri nets

Abstract

Performance analysis of systems is an important part of system evaluation. If the analyzed system exists, performance analysis can be based on system's measurements (using some sort of instrumentation). If the analyzed system does not exist (as is the case of system upgrading, improvement or design), the approach is to build a (mathematical) model of the system and to use this model for performance analysis. For systems exhibiting concurrency, resource sharing or synchronization of activities, Petri nets are very often used as the modeling formalism. In colored Petri nets, one of nontrivial tasks is to find bindings, i.e. mapping of free variables used in arc expressions to specific colors. Bindings are needed to determine state transitions of a system, therefore, are needed in all analyses of system's behavior. A heuristic approach is proposed which enhances the efficiency of finding bindings in colored Petri nets. Also, performance analysis is used to compare the proposed approach with some other approaches to finding bindings and some remarkable improvements are shown through this analysis.