In: Proc. 3-rd IEEE Annual Int. Computer Performance and Dependability Symposium (IPDS'98), 7-9 September 1998, Durham, NC, pages 109-118. 1998.
Abstract: Although it becomes more and more accepted that it is important to take into account performance and dependability issues throughout the design process of distributed systems, design languages and quantitative modeling formalisms are still separate worlds. This is largely due to the fact that their requirements are very different: design languages must offer ways to easily build structured, comprehensible system specifications, while quantitative models should allow for efficient and accurate analysis. Moreover, system designers and performance modelers generally have a different background. Aiming to bring these worlds together, a design language is introduced which includes quantitative properties of systems, and it is shown how specifications in this language can automatically be translated to a number of popular formalisms for quantitative distributed system modeling. Petri nets are the only formalism considered that is sufficiently powerful of express all functional aspects of the proposed language. However, although the expressiveness of Petri nets is sufficient, they give limited insight in the structure of the modeled system. Therefore it is preferable not to use Petri nets directly as a design language, but only as an underlying analysis formalism. Generalized stochastic Petri nets are used, however, generalization to other types of timed Petri nets is straightforward.
Keywords: AMB, design languages, distributed systems, performance evaluation, stochastic Petri nets, timed Petri nets.