Critical Paths in the Partial Order Unfolding of a Stochastic Petri Net

In concurrent real-time processes, the speed of individual components has a double impact: on the one hand, the overall latency of a compound process is affected by the latency of its components. But, if the composition has race conditions, the very outcome of the process will also depend on the latency of component processes. Using stochastic Petri nets, we investigate the probability of a transition occurrence being critical for the entire process, i.e. such that a small increase or decrease of the duration of the occurrence entails an increase or decrease of the total duration of the process. The first stage of the analysis focuses on occurrence nets, as obtained by partial order unfoldings, to determine criticality of events; we then lift to workflow nets to investigate criticality of transitions inside a workflow.