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The Advanced Network Colloquium Series

The Persiform French national project aims at developing a methodology and supporting tools to enable software architects to evaluate the performance of complex systems at design stage. Despite the existence of mature techniques, performance evaluation is still a specific, costly activity that raises the issue of the consistency between functional and performance models. To tackle these problems, the Persiform approach lies upon the adaptation of well-known functional design languages, namely UML 2.0 and Message Sequence Charts (MSC), and the automatic transformation of design models into performance simulation models.
UML 2.0 is restricted and extended by a specific Profile focussing on Activity Diagrams, while the textual syntax of MSC is enriched by resource consumptions. To allow for a common, clear execution semantics, an abstract intermediate language is defined that involves well-known concepts from Queueing Networks and procedural, colored Petri Nets with time and data. Using Model-Driven Engineering techniques, a full chain of model transformations is implemented that turns design models into intermediate models, then intermediate models into performance models.
The generated performance models can be read and used with HyPerformix Workbench, an industrial performance simulator.

Olivier Constant completed his Ph.D. in 2006 at the Research & Development division of France Telecom in Lannion, France with the University of Pau, France. His topic was the integration of performance simulation in the design of component-based systems. He is now working as a research engineer at Verimag in Grenoble, France. His research interests include component-based design, performance modeling, and rigorous metamodeling and model transformation techniques.