• Gunter Bolch, PhD, Academic Director in the Department of Computer Science, University of Erlangen. He is a coauthor of MOSEL, a powerful specification language based on Markov chains. He has published five textbooks and more than 130 articles on performance modeling of computer and communication systems and applications.

• Stefan Greiner, PhD, Researcher at the DaimlerChrysler AG. He is coauthor of MOSEL and the recipient of the best paper award at the ESS94 conference.

• Hermann de Meer, PhD, Professor in the Faculty of Computer Science and Mathematics, University of Passau. He holds a chair in the Computer Networking and Communications Department; has published more than eighty peer-reviewed articles on performance modeling, computer networking, self-organization, quality of service, and Peer-to-Peer systems; and holds several international patents on related topics.

• Kishor S. Trivedi, PhD, Chaired Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Department of Computer Science, Duke University. A Fellow of IEEE, he is the author of the bestselling textbook "Probability and Statistics with Reliability, Queueing, and Computer Science Applications", Second Edition.

• Dr. Jörg Barner (methodological background section in Chapter 1; laying out the chapters; producing and improving figures and plots; intensive proofreading)
• Pawan Choudhary (helped considerably with the simulation chapter)
• Dr. Dharmaraja Selvamuthu (helped with the section on SHARPE)
• Dr. Hairong Sun (helped in reading several chapters)
• Felix Engelhard (new or extended sections on distributions, parameter estimation, Petri nets, and non-Markovian systems; thorough proofreading)
• Patrick Wüchner (sections on matrix-analytic and matrix-geometric methods; MMPP and MAP sections; intensive proofreading; maintaining Web site)
• Dr. Michael Frank (wrote/extended sections on batch systems and networks, summation method, Kanban systems)
• Lassaad Essafi (application section on differentiated services in the Internet)
• Dr. Samuel Kounev and Prof. Alejandro Buchmann (allowing us to use their paper ”Performance Modelling and Evaluation of Large Scale J2EE Applications” to produce the J2EE section)
• Prof. Helena Szczerbicka (invaluable contribution to Chapter 11 on simulation and to modeling methodology section of Chapter 1)

The support from the Euro-NGI (Design and Engineering of the Next Generation Internet) Network of Excellence, European Commission grant IST-507613, is acknowledged.