Application of Petri net models for the evaluation of fault-tolerant techniques in distributed systems

Analytical models are presented that use Petri nets for fault-tolerant schemes used in distributed systems. These models are used in the quantitative evaluation and selection of good fault-tolerant schemes for specific system configurations. Several different fault-tolerant schemes that can be modeled using Petri nets are discussed in detail. These schemes include rollback recovery with checkpointing, recovery blocks, N-version programming, and conversations. After a brief review of Petri net models, extension of the Petri net models to incorporate fault-tolerant schemes is considered. A methodology for evaluating a fault-tolerant scheme for a specific system configuration and the steps involved in building a Petri net model of a fault-tolerant system are described. The subnet primitives involved in building these models are identified and an algorithm for building the models automatically is described. Examples illustrating this extended Petri net model are discussed and numerical results are presented to show the applicability of the models.