Expressiveness and Efficient Analysis of Stochastic Well-Formed Nets

This paper is a survey of the Stochastic Well-formed Net (SWN) formalism evolution, in particular it discusses the expressiveness of the formalism in terms of ease of use from the modeler point of view, and briefly presents the main results that can be found in the literature about efficient (state space based) analysis of SWN models. Software tools supporting SWN design and analysis are also mentioned in the paper. The goal of the paper is not to present in details the formalism nor the analysis algorithms, but rather to recall the achieved results and to highlight open problems and possible directions for new developments in this research area.