A simulator for service-based software system co-design

Abstract

The adoption of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as the foundation for developing a new generation of software systems poses important challenges in system design. While simulation tools serve a principal role in design, there is a growing recognition that simulation of Service-Based Software Systems (SBS) requires modeling capabilities beyond those that are developed for the traditional distributed software systems. In this paper, a novel simulator is developed based on the SOC-DEVS co-design approach and realized as an extension to the SOA-compliant DEVS simulator. The tool supports DEVS simulation modeling of not only the services consistent with Service-Oriented Computing (SOC) concepts and principles, but also the networked hardware components on which services must execute on. An example model for a voice communication system is developed to illustrate the kind of hardware and software components that can be modeled and simulated.