A Case Study in Performance Evaluation of Real-Time Teleoperation Software Architectures Using UML-MAST

Reference architectures for specific domains can provide significant benefits in productivity and quality for real-time systems development. These systems require an exact characterisation based on quantitative evaluation of architectural features referred to timing properties, such as performance, reliability, etc. In this work, an UML-based tool has been used to obtain a measure of performance between two alternative architectures. These architectures share the same functional components, but with different interaction patterns. The used technique is illustrated with an industrial study in a well-known real-time domain: teleoperation systems. The obtained results show clear differences in performance between two architectures, giving a clear indication of which one is better from this point of view1.