Properties and performance bounds for timed marked graphs

A class of synchronized queueing networks with deterministic routing is identified to be equivalent to a subclass of timed Petri nets called marked graphs. Some structural and behavioral properties of marked graphs are used to show interesting properties of this class of performance models. In particular, ergodicity is derived from the boundedness and liveness of the underlying Petri net representation. In the case of unbounded (i.e., nonstrongly connected) marked graphs, ergodicity is computed as a function of the average transition firing delays. For steady-state performance, linear programming problems defined on the incidence matrix of the underlying Petri nets are used to compute tight (i.e., attainable) bounds for the throughput of transitions for marked graphs with deterministic or stochastic time associated with transitions. These bounds depend on the initial marking and the mean values of the delays but not on the probability distortion functions. The benefits of interleaving qualitative and quantitative analysis of marked graph models are shown