QoS-aware MDA

System developers can often perceive managing QoS-requirements as complex, time consuming and abstract. As a result of not paying sufficient attention to QoS in the design phase, problems are discovered late in the development cycle, often not before the real system is set into operation. Thus, correcting QoS deficiencies often become very expensive and difficult to handle. One of the main reasons why QoS is difficult to treat in models is that there is a lack of precise relations between different models and between models and implementations with respect to QoS. Thereby, we believe the capturing and handling of QoS-requirements has to be an essential part of the MDA approach in order to gain successful system development of real time and embedded systems. Thus, the MDA approach needs to be QoSaware. Consequently, the QoS-specifications need to be part of the PIM and PSM models, the accomplishment of model transformation code generation, configuration and deployment should be QoS-aware and ideally also the target execution platform should be QoS-aware. This paper describes some significant aspects of a QoS-aware MDA approach for system development and execution.