evaluating software architectures by coloured petri nets
The quality of an architectural design of a software system has a great influence on achieving non-functional requirements to the system. In this paper, we present a technique for describing behavioral aspects of software architectures formally based on Coloured Petri Nets (CPNs) and a technique for evaluating their non-functional qualities by analyzing CPNs with a supporting tool. We provide quality models for evaluating security, efficiency and reliability, and integrate them with CPN descriptions of software architectures. Their qualities are evaluated by simulating the CPNs on CPN analysis tool called Design/CPN. To show the effectiveness of our techniques, we illustrate Applet architecture and CGI one in a web computing application, and evaluate their quality of security on network, of time-efficiency and of reliability on network by using Design/CPN. It allows us to clarify trade-off on issues of selecting which architecture should be selected.
software architecture coloured petri net evaluation and simulation non-functional quality attribute