Simulation Modeling of UML Software Architectures

Quantitative analysis of software systems is being recognized as an important issue in the software development process. Performance analysis can help to address quantitative system analysis from the early stages of the software development life cycle, e.g., to compare design alternatives or to identify system bottlenecks. Modeling software systems by simulation allows the analyst to represent detailed characteristics of the system. We consider simulation for performance evaluation of software architectures specified by UML. We derive a simulation model for annotated UML software architectures. First we propose the annotation for some UML diagrams to describe performance parameters. Then we derive the simulation model by automatically extracting information about Use Case and Activity Diagrams from the XMI descriptions of UML diagrams. This information is used to build a discrete-event simulation model, which is finally executed. Simulation results are inserted back into the original UML diagrams as tagged values to provide feedback at the software architectural design level