GSPN Compositional Semantics for UML Statecharts and Sequence
Diagrams
(2005)Submitted for publication.Abstract
Software performance engineering (SPE) is proposed as a method for
the performance evaluation of software systems early in the development
process. The generic approach of the SPE consists of deriving performance
models from UML specifications. This paper, following the SPE principles,
addresses the UML StateCharts (SCs) and the Sequence Diagrams (SDs)
as UML specifications, while performance models are specified with
Generalized Stochastic Petri Nets. The proposed derivation, actually
the authors interpretation of the SC and SD, provides these two kinds
of UML diagrams with a formal semantics. The interpretation is based
on the UML semi-formal semantics. A software fault tolerance mechanism
is used as an example to illustrate how, following the proposal,
the SC and the SD are automatically converted into GSPNs. Another
contribution of the work is the consistency study among the SC and
the SD, since they are used in a combined manner to obtain the target
performance model. The approach presented in this paper allows to
derive two kinds of performance models: one representing the behaviour
of the whole system and another representing the particular execution
described by a SD.