Abstrakt

Evaluating Reliability Impact of Design Decisions with the Palladio Component Model

Poovizhi Panpa P

Critical properties of software systems, such as reliability and performance, should be examined early in the development, when they can govern important architectural design decisions. Several architecture-based reliability analysis methods have been developed to support this task. However, these methods either oversee individual impact factors on reliability or hard-code them into formal models, which strongly limits their applicability to support architectural design in component-based development processes. Our approach, based on the Palladio Component Model (PCM), considers the relevant architectural factors of software systems in a highly parameterized UML-like model, allowing for transparent evaluation of architectural design options. It models the propagation of the system usage profile and execution environment throughout the architecture and automatically derives the component usage profiles, which are overseen in most of the existing approaches. Before analysis, the model is automatically transformed into a formal analytical model. Using a realistic example, we demonstrate the support of usage profile analysis.