Proceedings 8th International Workshop on Petri Nets and Performance Models (Cat. No.PR00331)

Design and operation of large systems is becoming increasingly complex. The interaction of cooperation and competition relationships leads to subtle and even paradoxical behaviours. Therefore formal methods are increasingly required in engineering practice. This is particularly true for performance evaluation, a natural starting point for the design and construction of large and complex systems. The aim of the multi-workshop was providing a meeting point for people working on different but related formal modelling paradigms for performance evaluation: Markov chains, Petri nets, and process algebras. The latter two formalisms are particularly suited for describing concurrent and distributed systems. In many cases, Markov chains provide the basic interleaved semantics of the underlying stochastic process, sometimes the only practical computational approach. Two application oriented satellite workshops were organized considering problems belonging to the entire life-cycle of manufacturing and telecommunication systems. These are quite representative domains of discrete event systems engineering problems arising in modern technology