Modeling of Component Diagrams Using Petri Nets

With the growing use of UML diagrams for software architecture description and the importance of non-functional requirements evaluation at software architecture level, filling the scientific gap between architect and requirement analyst is considered to be significant. Software architects are not usually familiar with non-functional requirement analysis and are not able to analyze such requirements easily. On the other hand, non-functional requirements cannot be evaluated directly by UML diagrams. Therefore, the architect should annotate additional information of the nonfunctional requirements to software architecture description and then an executable model can be produced. These executable models can be petri nets, queuing networks, stochastic process algebra and etc. One kind of the UML diagrams that can be used to describe software architecture is component diagram. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that enables an architect to transform a component diagram into an executable model based on different extensions of petri nets. Moreover, we show how to use this petri net model for performance evaluation and simulation and the implications of this transformation are described completely. Finally, to represent the usage of our proposed algorithm, we consider a case study as an example.