Automatic inclusion of middleware performance attributes into architectural UML software models

Distributed systems often use a form of communication middleware to cope with different forms of heterogeneity, including geographical spreading of the components, different programming languages and platform architectures, etc. The middleware, of course, impact the architecture and the performance of the system. This paper presents a model transformation framework to automatically include the architectural impact and the overhead incurred by using a middleware layer between several system components. Using this framework, architects can model the system in a middleware-independent fashion. Accurate, middleware-aware models can then be obtained automatically using a middleware model repository. The actual transformation algorithm is presented in more detail. The resulting models can be used to obtain performance models of the system. From those performance models, early indications of the system performance can be extracted.