In a distributed process control system, information about the behavior of
physical processes is usually collected and stored in a real-time database
which can be remotely accessed by human operators. In this paper we propose
an analytic approach to compute the response-time distribution of operator
consoles in a distributed process control environment. The technique we de
velop is based on Markov regenerative processes (MRGPs) and described with
the assistance of deterministic and stochastic Petri nets (DSPNs). We const
ruct exact models for performance analysis of centralized and decentralized
database architectures. However, due to limitations on the exact solution,
we also propose an approximate solution which is then used to study respon
se-time distributions of large systems. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All
rights reserved.