PETRI NET TOOLS FOR THE ANALYSIS OF COLLABORATIVE TASKS

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Gonsalves, Tad | Kawabata, Ryo | Tabata, Shunya | Itoh, Kiyoshi

Affiliations: Information Systems Engineering Laboratory, Sophia University, Tokyo Japan

Abstract: This paper proposes an analysis process and tools for analysing collaboration task. In order to analyse the collaboration task, it is important to grasp not only the workflow in the entire system, but also the flow of the personnel who are engaged in collaboration. The general workflow and the flow of personnel in collaborative systems are usually distributed and concurrent. Petri nets are ideal modelling tools for the description and analysis of concurrent systems. However, the flexibility in the Petri net constructs can at times lead to the introduction of the analyst's subjectivity in the description and analysis of a system. This fact, particularly in the case of collaborative systems, fails to depict their client-server feature. We propose disciplined client-server Peri nets and a suit of tools that aid the description, analysis and performance evaluation of collaborative systems. The Petri net Editor serves as a drawing board to sketch the system diagram; the Petri net Visualizer gives a visual display of the system operation and the Petri net Simulator simulates the system operation. By using these tools, the behaviour of the Petri net can be captured and the system performance can be estimated. We also present Petri net models of two practical collaborative systems with distributed and concurrent service and estimate their performance by using the tools that we have designed.

Keywords: Petri net, collaborative tasks, collaborative systems

Journal: Journal of Integrated Design & Process Science, vol. 12, no. 1, pp. 23-38, 2008