Architecture-based performance analysis of the COLLINS class submarine open system extension (COSE) concept demonstrator (CD)

Being able to predict the overall performance of a computer based system, prior to building it, is one of the greatest challenges facing system engineers today. The emerging discipline of system architecture, by defining a high level abstraction of the overall structure of the system, hopes to provide the foundation for this reasoning. The authors demonstrate an architecture-based performance analysis technique on the COLLINS class submarine Open System Extension (COSE) Concept Demonstrator (CD) system. The layered architectural design of the COSE CD system, together with it's normally probabilistic, repeatable and predictable nature for varying loads, makes it suitable to an architecture-based approach to performance analysis. An architectural model of the system is developed and populated and then used to predict the performance characteristics of service time, waiting time, response time and device utilisation. These predictions are then verified against theoretical performance predictions and validated against a preliminary implementation of the system.