A unified framework for design and performance analysis of distributed systems

Although it becomes more and more accepted that it is important to take into account performance and dependability issues throughout the design process of distributed systems, design languages and quantitative modelling formalisms are still separate worlds. This is largely due to the fact that their requirements are very different: design languages must offer ways to easily build structured, comprehensible system specifications, while quantitative models should allow for efficient and accurate analysis. Moreover, system designers and performance modellers generally have a very different background. Aiming to bring these worlds together, we introduce a design language which includes quantitative properties of systems, and we show how specifications in this language can automatically be translated to a number of popular formalisms for quantitative distributed system modelling. The most appropriate performance modelling formalism to translate to is chosen based on the analysis goal and the characteristics of the design.