Derivation of Petri Net Performance Models from UML Specifications of Communications Software

As hardware becomes faster and bandwidth greater, the determination of the performance of software based systems during design, known as Software Performance Engineering (SPE), is a growing concern. A recent seminar of experts at Dagstuhl and the First International Workshop on Software and Performance have both highlighted the need to bring performance evaluation into the software design process. The Unified Modelling Language (UML) has emerged in the last two years as a widely accepted standard notation for software design and it is an attractive vehicle for SPE. In this paper UML’s Collaboration and Statechart diagrams are shown to allow systematic generation of Generalised Stochastic Petri Net (GSPN) models, which can be solved to find their throughput and other performance measures. Using the example of communication via the alternating bit protocol, such a mapping is demonstrated and the resulting GSPN solved using the SPNP package. The basis of a usable methodology for SPE is explored.