World renowned leaders in the field provide an accessible introduction to the use of Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets (GSPNs) for the performance analysis of diverse distributed systems. Divided into two parts, it begins with a summary of the major results in GSPN theory. The second section is devoted entirely to application examples which demonstrate how GSPN methodology can be used in different arenas. A simple version of the software tool used to analyse GSPN models is included with the book and a concise manual for its use is presented in the later chapters.