SimuLizar: Design-Time modeling and Performance Analysis of Self-Adaptive Systems

Modern software systems adapt themselves to changing environments, to meet quality-of-service requirements, such as response time limits. The engineering of the system’s self-adaptation logic does not only require new modeling methods, but also new analyzes of transient phases. Model-driven software performance engineering methods already allow design-time analysis of steady states of non-adaptive system models. In order to validate requirements for transient phases, new modeling and analysis methods are needed. In this paper, we present SimuLizar, our initial model-driven approach to model self-adaptive systems and analyze the performance of their transient phases. Our evaluation of a load balancer toy example shows the applicability of our modeling approach. Additionally, a comparison of our performance analysis with a prototypical implementation of our example system shows that the prediction accuracy is sufficient to identify unsatisfactory self-adaptations.