Component-Oriented Specification of Performance Measures

Abstract

Formal notations for system performance modeling need to be equipped with suitable notations for specifying performance measures. These companion notations have been traditionally based on reward structures and, more recently, on temporal logic. In this paper we propose a mixed approach, which aims at facilitating the specification of performance measures by allowing the designer to express them in a component-oriented way. The resulting Measure Specification Language MSL, which is being integrated in Æmilia/TwoTowers, is interpreted both on action-labeled continuous-time Markov chains and on stochastic process algebras. The latter interpretation provides a compositional framework for performance-sensitive model manipulations and emphasizes the increased expressiveness with respect to traditional reward structures for modeling notations in which the concept of state is implicit.