On the success of stochastic Petri nets

Stochastic Petri nets (SPNs) are discussed from the point of view of the results that have contributed most to the dissemination of this formalism. The historical context in which SPN ideas have developed is briefly reviewed to recount the motivations that have driven this research field and to show how its success has been recognized by the scientific community. A few directions of research are discussed at the end of the paper to outline the open problems that still need to be solved to make this formalism useful for the analysis of real systems