A New Two-Phase Approach for Petri Net Based Modeling of Scheduling Problems

This paper presents a new two-phase approach for Petri Net based modeling of scheduling problems. Though Petri Nets have been used as heuristic approach for modeling scheduling problems, literature study reveals two major difficulties: 1) the large size of Petri Net models, and 2) the inability to differentiate workstations. In this paper, these two difficulties are avoided by a two-phase approach known as Activity-Oriented Petri Nets (AOPN). General Purpose Petri Net Simulator (GPenSIM) is a new Petri Net simulator that implements AOPN on MATLAB platform. This paper introduces AOPN and GPenSIM in a tutorial style, working through an example on job scheduling in grid computing. This example shows the usability of the AOPN approach for the modeling of scheduling problems and the easiness of GPenSIM for coding and simulation.