3 Modeling case studies

3.1 Producer/consumer, buffers

The producer/consumer system consists of three parts: a producer producing some kind of items, which are placed in a buffer, which is consulted by a consumer consuming the items. The variations include the capacity of the buffer and sequential or parallel arrangement of the buffer cells.[Reisig 1998]

The simplest version is for the buffer capacity one:

Figure PCB-1. One cell system

 

The next version, not much more complicated than PCB-1, has buffer capacity two. Using the construction of Section 2.1 we obtain:

Figure PCB-2. Sequential cells

The system in PBC-2 can be characterized as a producer/consumer system with sequential buffer cells. This version also has the characteristic that no overtaking can take place, i.e., the items will be consumed in the order they are produced. We next look at two versions with parallel buffer cells.