Patent ID: 8145468

Claim:
A system including instructions recorded on a non-transitory computer-readable storage medium and executable by at least one processor, the system comprising an annotation engine configured to cause the at least one processor to input a development model of a software application and associate annotations with elements of the development model, and configured to provide links between each annotation and its associated element to thereby output a composition model; a transformation manager configured to cause the at least one processor to coordinate at least two transformation engines within a transformation chain, each transformation engine associated with an input model and a transformed model, wherein at least one of the transformation engines is configured to receive the composition model in association with a corresponding input model and output an annotated, transformed model based thereon; a trace model manager configured to cause the at least one processor to coordinate at least two trace model generators for generating trace models, each trace model associated with a corresponding transformation engine and relating source elements of a corresponding input model to target elements of a corresponding transformed model, wherein the trace model manager is configured to track and store a relationship between each of the at least two trace models and each corresponding input model and transformed model; and a simulation manager configured to cause the at least one processor to execute a simulator associated with one of the at least two transformation engines and configured to receive a corresponding transformed model therefrom as a simulation model, based on the annotated, transformed model, and configured to output a simulation of the simulation model including simulation results; wherein the trace manager is configured to link elements of the simulation of the simulation model with elements of the development model, using the stored relationships, to thereby provide a simulation of the development model in which the simulation results are displayed in conjunction with the development model.