On the relations between BCMP queueing networks and product form solution stochastic Petri nets

In this paper we show that multi-class BCMP queueing networks can be represented by means of Product Form Solution Stochastic Petri Nets (PF-SPNs). Since the first time PF-SPNs were proposed, one of their main drawbacks concerned the fact that there was no clear relation between PF-SPNs and PF-QNs, in particular the well-known multi-class BCMP-QNs. It is important to note that the existence of the product form solution is not a property of the formalism, but of the underlying Markovian process. Hence, the fact that PF-SPNs (and also PF-GSPNs) cannot directly represent BCMP-QNs is one of the weaknesses of the SPN product-form results. The results presented in this paper overcome this weakness. In particular, we show that starting from a detailed GSPN representation of each of the BCMP station types, it is possible to derive equivalent compact PF-SPN representations for each station type.