In: Computer Systems Science and Engineering, Vol. 13, No. 6, pages 339-351. 1998.
Abstract: The analysis of stochastic systems with non-exponential timing requires the development of suitable modeling tools. Recently, some effort has been devoted to generalize the concept of Stochastic Petri nets, by allowing the firing times to be generally distributed. The evolution of the Petri Net (PN) in time becomes a stochastic process, for which in general, no analytical solution is available. The paper surveys suitable restrictions of the PN model with generally distributed transition times, that have appeared in the literature, and compares these models from the point of view of the modeling power and the numerical complexity.
Keywords: Markov models, Markov regenerative processes, non-exponential distributions, performance evaluation, phase-type distributions, reward models, semi=Markov models, stochastic Petri nets.