An Introduction to New Extensions for Stochastic Activity Networks

Stochastic activity networks (SANs) are a powerful and flexible extension of Petri nets. However, SANs facilities are not enough for modeling and analysis of complex and large-scale systems. In order to provide such high-level modeling facilities, we have defined some new extensions for SANs. We intend to preserve all capabilities of SANs for performance, dependability and performability evaluations in these new extensions. In this paper, we present a brief introduction to these new extensions, including hierarchical stochastic activity networks (HSANs), colored stochastic activity networks (CSANs), and object stochastic activity networks (OSANs). Some properties and applications of these models and their analysis methods will also be discussed.