Structural performance analysis of stochastic Petri nets

Structure performance analysis theory and techniques is an essay to avoid the computational complexity problem associated to Markovian and discrete event simulation techniques. Even if a finished conceptual and technical framework is not yet available, important benefits have been obtained not only from performance but also from correctness analysis point of view. In this survey we overview some of the achievements developed by the authors and collaborators towards a structure theory for performance evaluation of net based models. Concepts and techniques for the computation of performance bounds and approximate and exact evaluation are described in a semiformal/illustrative way through a selected collection of examples