A Brief Study on Stochastic Petri Net

Stochastic Petri nets (SPNs) are extended Petri nets where the transitions fire after a probabilistic delay determined by a random variable. There have been a lot of members added to the SPN family, featuring different time specifications. The most fundamental Markov SPN model and Generalized SPN will be studied in this report. Some relatively mature analysis methods of Petri Nets or Markov processes (if applicable) can be applied directly to SPNs. However, there is still the complexity and state explosion problems for SPNs restricting its application. Nowadays, I see SPNs not so broadly used as described in papers from last century, but it’s still in use in some simple systems such as Discrete Events Systems. A recent application on this will be briefly studied.