Petri Net Translation Patterns for the Analysis of eBusiness Collaboration Messaging Protocols

Abstract

Electronic messaging protocols such as RosettaNet (RN) automate the asynchronous exchange of business documents between collaborating trading partners over the Internet. Such protocols commonly employ mechanisms such as retries, time-outs, and fault handling to overcome uncertainty in the timing and reliability of message transmission, receipt, and processing. To determine the reliability and performance of such a protocol under varying network and message processing conditions, we have developed reusable patterns for Petri net modeling of these common mechanisms and used them to assemble a timed Petri net simulation that represents the RN standard's behavior. The reusable patterns are derived through translation of the abstract representations provided in the RN standard into an executable model, paving the way for a multimodeling approach for supply chain communications. The resulting stochastic Petri net is simulated to generate performance curves guiding improved protocol reliability.