Serial failure diagnosis of a distributed processing system by Petri nets

Recently, network technologies have rapidly developed, and distributed processing systems which are of asynchronous and parallel characteristics are very useful in various fields. However, it is very difficult to figure out the factors of failure of such systems. In this paper, the authors make a Petri net model of a simple distributed processing system consisting of a main system and a subsystem, and show how to diagnose serial failure of the system by analyzing invariant sets of the model.