Coloured Stochastic Activity Networks: Preliminary Definitions and Properties

Several high-level extensions have been introduced for Petri nets (PNs). Coloured Petri nets (CPNs) are the most famous high-level extensions of PNs. Stochastic activity networks (SANs) are a stochastic generalization of PNs. These models have widely been used for dependability and performability evaluation purposes and are supported with a few powerful modeling tools. To provide some high-level facilities for SANs, we have defined coloured stochastic activity networks (CSANs). CSANs provide the possibility of data manipulation and hierarchical modeling. In this paper, we present the informal and formal definitions, some examples and an introduction to the analysis of these models. ______________________________________________________________________