On proposing a Markup Language for Statecharts to be used in Performance Evaluation

Statecharts have been originally created to specify complex reactive systems for use in simulating real-time applications. They are an extension of state transition diagrams with notions of hierarchy, concurrency and synchronization. Recently they have been used for specifying and dealing analytically with performance models in which a Statecharts representation is converted into a Markov chain from which steady-state probabilities are obtained. A software system, PerformCharts, has been developed for this purpose. At the moment, the specification of a reactive system and its conversion into a Markov Chain, within PerformCharts, have to be written in C++ language within the main program. The paper, therefore, proposes a markup language based on XML to serve as an interface to specify, in Statecharts, a complex reactive system with the objective of evaluating its performance. Procedures of how to deal with such specification in order to generate the necessary performance evaluation information are provided. Key-Words: Statecharts, PcML, Performance, Markup, XML

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