Performance Analysis Using Stochastic Petri Nets

An isomorphism between the behavior of Petri nets with exponentially distributed transition rates and Markov processes is presented. In particular, k-bounded Petri nets are isomorphic to finite Markov processes and can be solved by standard techniques if k is not too large. As a practical example, we solve for the steady state average message delay and throughput on a communication link when the alternating bit protocol is used for error recovery.