Model-Driven Performance Analysis

Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) is an approach to develop software systems by creating models and applying automated transformations to them to ultimately generate the implementation for a target platform. Although the main focus of MDE is on the generation of code, it is also necessary to support the analysis of the designs with respect to quality attributes such as performance. To complement the model-to-implementation path of MDE approaches, an MDE tool infrastructure should provide what we call model-driven analysis. This paper describes an approach to model-driven analysis based on reasoning frameworks. In particular, it describes a performance reasoning framework that can transform a design into a model suitable for analysis of real-time performance properties with different evaluation procedures including rate monotonic analysis and simulation. The concepts presented in this paper have been implemented in the PACC Starter Kit, a development environment that supports code generation and analysis from the same models.