QPME 2.0 Released as Open-Source Project

A major new version of QPME (Queueing Petri net Modeling Environment), version 2.0, was released today and is now available under the terms of the Eclipse Public License (EPL) v1.0.

QPME (Queueing Petri net Modeling Environment) is a tool for stochastic modeling and analysis based on the Queueing Petri Net (QPN) modeling formalism. Queueing Petri Nets are a combination of conventional queueing networks and stochastic Petri nets providing increased expressiveness and thus making it possible to model systems at a higher degree of accuracy. The development of the tool started in 2003 at the Technische Universität Darmstadt and was continued at the University of Cambridge from 2006 to 2008. Since 2008, QPME is being developed and maintained by the Descartes Research Group at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). The first version was released in January 2007 and since then the tool has been distributed to more than 120 universities, companies and research institutes worldwide.

QPME is made of two components: QPE (QPN Editor) and SimQPN (Simulator for QPNs). QPE provides a user-friendly graphical tool for modeling using QPNs based on the Eclipse/GEF framework. SimQPN provides an efficient discrete-event simulation engine for QPNs that makes it possible to analyze models of realistically-sized systems. QPME runs on a wide range of platforms including Windows, Linux, Mac OS and Solaris among others.

The new features introduced in Version 2.0 include:

• Advanced query engine for processing and visualization of the results from model analysis.
• Centralized management of queue specifications.
• Support for having multiple queueing places that share the same underlying physical queue.
• Significant improvements in the performance and scalability of the simulation engine (SimQPN).
• Support for simulating hierarchical QPNs using SimQPN.
• Support for defining probes that specify metrics of interest for which statistics should be collected during a simulation.
• Automatic detection of infinitely growing queues (model instability).
• Support for empirical and deterministic distributions.
• A number of features improving user friendliness (e.g., simulation progress bar and "stop simulation" button).
• New simulation configuration parameters "bucketSize" and "maxBuckets" to customize histogram generation.
• Ported to the latest Eclipse version 3.6.
• Various bug fixes and optimizations.

For more details see the ChangeLog.

Further information can be found at the QPME Project Website.

To stay up-to-date on the QPME project, you can subscribe to the QPME Mailing List qpme(at)ira.uka.de. You can do this by sending an email to qpme-join(at)ira.uka.de and you will receive an automatically generated email with a link to confirm your subscription. Once you have subscribed, you will be informed whenever a new version of QPME or related tools are released.