The CAN FB (Controller Area Network FieldBus) has been in existence for ten years. It supports automated manufacturing and process control environments to interconnect intelligent devices such as valves, sensors, and actuators. CAN FieldBus has a high bit rate and the ability to detect errors. It is immune to noise and resistant to shock, vibration, and heat. Two recently introduced mechanisms, Distributed Priority Queue (DPQ) and Priority Promotion (PP) enable CAN FieldBus networks to share out the system bandwidth and grant ail upper bound on the transmission times so as to meet the requirements in real-time communications. Modeling and analysis of such networks are an important research area for their wide applications in manufacturing automation.

This thesis presents a Petri net methodology which models and analyzes CAN FieldBus access protocol. A Reachability Graph of the Petri net model is -utilized to study the behavioral properties of the protocol. A timed Petri net simulator is used to evaluate the performance of the protocol. Performance measures include the completion time for successful events and operations. Operational parameters investigated using the Petri Net model are FieldBus speed, the length of each frame, and the number of frames in a message.