Modelling- and Simulation-Based Design of Multi-tier Systems

This paper introduces a domain-specific language for modelling and simulationbased design of multi-tier systems. Multi-tier systems are complex and very few general models have been developed. Rather, models are always dedicated to a specific architecture. Our approach allows for rapid experimentation with different multi-tier alternatives. Not only parameters, but also structure can be drastically varied. Using graph transformation, multi-tier systems models are translated into Queueing Petri Nets (QPNs) in a systematic way for analysis with the SimQPN simulator. We describe QPN, our multi-tier architecture visual language, as well as the transformation between them. A case study demonstrates the power of the approach for design-space exploration.