Modeling Discrete-Event Systems with GPenSIM: An Introduction

Modeling Discrete-Event Systems with GPenSIM describes the design and applications of General Purpose Petri Net Simulator (GPenSIM), a software tool for modeling, simulation, and performance analysis of discrete-event systems. The brief explains the principles of modeling discrete-event systems, as well as the design and applications of GPenSIM. It is based on the author’s lectures.

The brief uses GPenSIM to enable the efficient modeling of complex and large-scale discrete-event systems. GPenSIM, based on MATLAB, is designed to allow easy integration of Petri net models with a vast number of toolboxes available in MATLAB. For example, a couple of examples in the book use Statistics and Machine Learning Toolbox. The book offers an approach for developing models that can interact with the external environment; this will help readers to solve problems in industrial diverse fields. These problems include:

• Airport capacity evaluation for aviation authorities
• Finding bottlenecks in supply chains
• Scheduling drilling operations in the oil and gas industry
• Optimal scheduling of jobs in grid computing

This brief is of interest to researchers working on the modeling, simulation, and performance evaluation of discrete-event systems, as it shows them the design and applications of an efficient modeling package. Since the book also explains the basic principles of modeling discrete-event systems in a step-by-step manner, it is also of interest to final-year undergraduate and postgraduate students.