In: IEEE Trans. on Industrial Electronics, Vol. 41, No. 6, pages 641-653. 1994.
Abstract: The Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) is the ISO standard communication protocol specific to manufacturing. To analyze MMS design and performance, service unit automata are introduced to represent individual MMS services, while service connection Petri Nets (PN's) are constructed from these automata to describe MMS service connections and processes. This approach makes MMS protocol specification and analysis possible in terms of well-developed concepts and methods in PN theory. It leads to a distributed and hierarchical model of MMS software system by integrating service connection PN's. A generalized stochastic PN for MMS performance evaluation is obtained by incorporating service parameters and time factors into the model. A technique based on T-invariants is used to simplify the performance analysis.
Keywords: Petri nets, T-invariants, communication protocols, performance analysis.