Performance Analysis.

Closely related to software engineering the area of performance analysis has a long history. Many methods applied in this field go back to classical results, for example, in queueing theory [64,54]. Probabilistic and statistical methods and in particular the theory of Markov Chains are applied in order to analyse, for example, average and long run properties [45,40,55,33]. Our approach differs in as far as we aim to develop language-based analyses starting from ``first principles'' [18]. This means that we will refer to language semantics as the basis of analyses rather than models commonly used in performance analysis such as stochastic Petri nets [32].