Exploiting timed Petri net properties for distributed simulation partitioning

The authors develop a distributed simulation mechanism based on the optimistic strategy (Time Warp) to study timed transition Petri net (TTPN) models. The approach addresses the problem of partitioning the simulation model into logical processes to be run concurrently on individual processing nodes in a distributed memory multiprocessor system. They propose a partitioning such that several transitions together with all their input places are simulated by a single logical process, to avoid the substantial overhead induced by a distributed conflict resolution protocol in a message passing environment. Subnets are constructed from the topological description of the TTPN so that conflict resolution always occurs internally to a logical process, thus involving no communication overhead. Additional aggregation of conflict sets into larger logical simulation processes may increase the balancing of the distributed simulation without decreasing its inherent parallelism if some conditions are verified on the TTPN model structure