PERF (Performance Evaluation of Complex Systems: Techniques, Methodologies and Tools

The aim of this Project is to study the foundations of performance evaluation, i.e., reliability, efficacy, efficiency, safety, and other Quality of Service attributes, and to advance the state of the art of its methods and tools as to make them able to tackle the complexity of the applications and the systems driving the Information Society and easy to use even by non specialists. The research activities of the 15 research groups involved in the Project will focus on measurement techniques and workload characterization, on formalisms for modeling quantitative and qualitative aspects of complex systems, on solution methods of analytical, numerical and simulation models. In particular, the research is organized into five Work Packages. The activities carried out within these Work Packages deal with workload models, measurement techniques, models based on formalisms, such as, single queue, queueing networks, stochastic Markovian and non Markovian processes, timed Petri nets, stochastic non Markovian Petri nets, process algebra and fault tree, methodologies and tools to predict, at design time, the performance of the system under study, exact closed and iterative solutions, approximate solutions, simulation models of complex systems, distributed simulations. Within each activity, new techniques and methodologies will be proposed. Tools for performance evaluation will be developed as an integral part of such activities.