In: Proceedings of 10th IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC'04), March 03 - 05, 2004, Papeete, Tahiti, French Polynesia, pages 363-372. IEEE Press, March 2004.
Abstract: Reuse is a well-known and widely accepted principle in design and programming, that is instantiated through two main means: modularity and inheritance. Modularity allows a function or a data type and associated functions to be reused, while inheritance is based on the idea that a set of common features of a type can be factorized into a common super-type. While modularity has been widely exploited in performance and dependability modelling, inheritance is instead pretty much a "still-to-investigate" topic for this field. This paper discusses the role of inheritance in Stochastic Petri Nets (SPN) modelling, by considering a representation of the Fault, Error, and Failure (FEF) chain based on hierarchies of classes (in the class diagram formalism of UML) and corresponding hierarchies of SPN models.