Process and resource boxes: an integrated PN performance model for applications and architectures

The work presented in this paper is part of a larger project aiming at developing a performance oriented parallel system design method based on Petri nets (PNs) and actually usable in industrial frameworks. As modularity and compositionality are crucial for usability/reusability, previous work proposed the process-box as a net-based construct for modelling concurrent applications such as Occam programs. Here we extend the approach by introducing the resource-box and we show, as an example, how the two constructs are jointly used for modelling a simple architecture and its workload. The example given also allows us to point out how the proposed approach enhances the effectiveness and usability/reusability of GSPN, the most widely used Petri net-based formalism for performance evaluation