Dependability Analysis in the Early Phases of UML Based System Design

A thorough system specification is insufficient to guarantee that a computer system will adequately perform its tasks during its entire life cycle. The early evaluation of system characteristics like dependability, correctness and performance is necessary to assess the conformance of the system under development to its targets. This paper presents the results achieved so far to develop an integrated environment, where design tools based on the UML (Unified Modeling Language) are augmented with validation and analysis techniques that provide useful information in the early phases of system design. Automatic transformations are defined for the generation of models to capture system behavioral properties, dependability and performance.