Automated Evaluation of Coordination Approaches

How to coordinate the processes in a complex component-based software system is a nontrivial issue. Many different coordination approaches exist, each with its own specific advantages and drawbacks. To support their mutual comparison, this paper proposes a formal methodology to automatically evaluate the performance of coordination approaches. This methodology comprises (1) creation of simulation models of coordination approaches, (2) execution of simulation experiments of these models applied to test examples, and (3) automated evaluation of the models against specified requirements. Moreover, in a specific case study, the methodology is used to evaluate some coordination approaches that originate from various disciplines.