Determination of path identifiers for reliability analysis of a broadcasting network using Petri nets

A Petri net approach for determination of the sets of path identifiers for reliability analysis of a broadcasting network is presented. The firing concept of Petri nets is exploited to give a Petri net interpretation to certain properties of the network. The dynamic behaviour of the system under study is represented in the form of token movements within the model. The various entities of Petri nets are assigned an appropriate interpretation for studying the behaviour of the system at different levels. Corresponding to the source node and each of the terminal nodes, a vector, representing the state of the Petri net interpreted model, is defined by assuming a token initially at the source place and finally at one of the terminal places. The reachability and marking concepts are then used to determine all success states of the system. The developed algorithm has been coded into FORTRAN-77 and the complete package is available. The proposed technique is extremely simple as it uses only vector additions on the columns of the place-to-transition incident matrix.