About the Approximation of Stochastic Petri Nets by Continuous Petri Nets: Several Regions

Abstract

Reliability analysis is often based on stochastic discrete event models like Markov models or stochastic Petri nets. For complex dynamical systems with numerous components, analytical expressions of the steady state are tedious to work out because of the combinatory explosion with discrete models. Moreover, the convergence of stochastic estimators is slow. For these reasons, fluidification can be investigated to estimate the asymptotic behaviour of stochastic processes with timed continuous Petri nets. The contribution of this paper is to point out the limits of the fluidification in the context of the stochastic steady state approximation. Unfortunately, the asymptotic mean marking of stochastic and continuous Petri nets with same structure and same initial marking are mainly often different. This paper shows that this difficulty is related to the partition in regions of the reachability state space and the existence of critical region.