A PEPA Specification of an Industrial Production Cell

Abstract

This paper describes the use of the stochastic process algebra PEPA to model and evaluate the performance of an industrial production cell. An initial speci cation of the production cell is is developed and transformed to allow performance measures of the cell to be found. The reasons for making these transformations are given, and performance measures for the transformed speci cation are presented.

Experiences with the PEPA performance modelling tools

“…However, when others have used our modelling tools we have found that it is frequently because they have a particular application which they wish to investigate and they have adopted the PEPA formalism for the description and analysis of the application of interest. In this setting it is then typical for the users of our modelling tools to observe that they would wish to have an extended modelling language which included, for example, operators such as the LOTOS disabling operator or sequential composition at the level of model components [17] or parametric definition of components [18]. These facilities would make the modelling language more comfortable to use but until complementary solution techniques have been devised they would in fact only serve to allow the description of models with larger state spaces, thereby giving additional problems for the model solution utilities.…”

“…Both [17] and [18] used Matlab to solve their models and analyse the results. Here the size of the models which could be solved increased ten-fold from those which could be solved by Maple.…”

Stochastic Process Algebras

“…Robotic workcells Robert Holton of the University of Bradford used PEPA models to analyse the performance and functional correctness of a robotic workcell designed for a automated manufacturing system [3,2]. Cellular telephone networks A team from the PRiSM Laboratory at the University of Versailles considered a problem of dimensioning in a cellular telephone network.…”

“…Many case studies demonstrating these and other benefits have appeared in the literature [2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16].…”

Replicating Web Services for Scalability

“…There are now many papers where stochastic process calculus models are mapped to Continuous-Time Markov Chains for performance analysis [6][7][8]. Hillston's method of mapping process calculus models to ordinary differential equations is a more recent development [5] but has already been used to analyse peer-to-peer systems [9] and internet-scale spread of computer viruses such as worms [10].…”