A Model-Driven Framework for Architectural Evaluation of Mobile Software Systems

A Model-Driven Framework for Architectural Evaluation of Mobile Software Systems (Demo, Poster)
Student: George Edwards, USC
Advisor: Nenad Medvidovic, USC/ISR
Abstract: Distributed systems simulation environments provide a powerful and effective mechanism for evaluating, refining, and validating software architectures. Unfortunately, previous distributed systems simulators generally employ inadequate modeling techniques that make specifying representations of distributed applications unintuitive or tedious. To address this problem, we are developing an architectural modeling and simulation tool-chain that leverages the Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) approach to system design. The tool-chain employs an extensible modeling environment with a base set of architectural primitives, and implements a pluggable set of discrete event simulators that provide quantitative analysis of latency, fault tolerance, and power consumption in a mobile, wireless environment. The results of the simulations can be used to investigate the consequences of architectural decisions, weigh architectural trade-offs, and validate the achievement of quality attributes.
Bio: George Edwards is a Ph.D. student in the Computer Science Department at the University of Southern California. He joined the Software Architecture Research Group in the fall of 2004 under the advisement of Dr. Nenad Medvidovic. In the spring of 2006, he passed the Ph.D. Screening and received his M.S. in Computer Science from USC. Since the summer of 2005, George has also been a member of the C4ISR Software Architecture Group at The Boeing Company, working on the Future Combat System (FCS) program. Prior to attending USC, George received his B.S. from Vanderbilt University and spent one year in the M.S. program at Vanderbilt, advised by Dr. Douglas C. Schmidt. His interests include software architecture modeling and simulation and distributed, real-time, embedded (DRE) systems.