Tutorials

Abstract

This tutorial covers motivation, use, and advantages of stochastic Petri nets as a tool for reliability evaluation of complex systems. Rare-event simulation techniques are demonstrated, which are applicable to a wide class of reliability problems. While this approach is known in the academic world, it has not yet been adopted much in industrial applications despite its apparent benefits.

Additional triggers for this tutorial are advances in rare event simulation for this model class as well as the recent standard IEC62551 for dependability evaluation with Petri nets. New results in performability evaluation using an integration of simulation and numerical analysis are presented. Example case studies and tool support is demonstrated.

You can download the full tutorial info here in pdf format.

Curriculum Vitae

Armin Zimmermann studied computer science at Technische Universität Dresden and Technische Universität Berlin. Since 1994 he was with the performance evaluation group of Prof. Hommel at TU Berlin. His PhD thesis proposed a modelling and analysis method for manufacturing systems based on coloured Petri nets. The thesis received the Krone award, the Carl Ramsauer award, and the Chorafas Foundation award. Armin Zimmermann held a position as a research fellow 1995-1999 and 1999-2006 as PostDoc research assistant at TU Berlin. During this time he was the principal investigator of the research group Model-Based Evaluation of Discrete Real-Time Systems and coordinated the graduate research training group "Stochastic Modelling and Quantitative Analysis of Complex Systems in Engineering". He is project manager of TimeNET software development since 1996. In 1998 and 1999 he was a visiting scientist at the Universidad de Zaragoza, Spain, in the research group of Prof. Silva. He was a guest lecturer at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in 2001 and at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute for IT Systems Engineering of University Potsdam 2003 - 2006. His Habilitation was awarded in 2006 with a work on Stochastic Discrete Event Systems, which is available as a Springer book.

He worked as a guest professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering at the University of Potsdam, and held a substitute professorship for Real-Time Systems and Robotics at TU Berlin. In summer 2008 he was appointed head of the System and Software Engineering group at Technische Universität Ilmenau, in the Computer Science and Automation faculty. Since 2012 he serves as director of the Institute for Computer and Systems Engineering at TUI.

Since 2008 he serves as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics in the area Formal Methods, Distributed & Discrete Event Systems in Automation and Embedded Systems. He is a member of the Industrial Automated Systems and Controls Subcommittee of the IEEE IES Technical Committee on Factory Automation (TCFA). Armin Zimmermann is editorial board member of the Int. Journal of Critical Computer-Based Systems (IJCCBS).

He teaches courses on Modelling, Performance analysis and Simulation, Software Engineering, Robotics, Real-time and Embedded Systems, Automation, and Operating Systems.

He is a member of the IEEE and the German Informatics Society (GI). His research interests include modelling, performance and dependability evaluation, optimization, and control of technical systems using discrete-event models as well as their tool support.