Performance analysis of MMS using GSPN

A performance analysis of Manufacturing Message Specification (MMS) software has been conducted by using the generalized stochastic Petri net (GSPN). The criteria used in the evaluation are average service waiting, processing, and transporting times, and system utilization. The feasibility of using MMS for a robotic platform system is discussed based on the performance evaluation. It is shown that the service arriving rate has a significant effect on several important performance indices, such as the number of waiting services and system utilization. This indicates that MMS performance is quite sensitive to the application environments. Therefore, for real-time control systems with high communication intensity, the time delay through MMS might be unacceptable and some service requests may have to be balked. To solve the problem, one has either to reduce the intensity of message transferring in the system or to simplify MMS communication protocol, or do both