Visual feedback for design-space exploration with UML MARTE

UML and specialized profiles, such as MARTE, constitute promising specification and modeling tools in the field of system development. Language-based specification and resource modeling shortens the design cycle, and allows the generation of performance simulation models for design-space exploration. Thereby, current solutions in the field of UML based system-development will not allow the feedback of such performance estimation processes to be included into the UML system model and its visual representation. Enabling such feedback yields a consistent EDA design flow, that provides a transparent abstraction layer for performance simulation results, independent from the utilized performance simulation methods. With this work, we introduce a novel UML stereotype, providing such a visualization of results from performance estimation methods. Additionally, we demonstrate a method to implement the generation of UML diagrams using this stereotype. The proposed approach fosters the comparison of design alternatives, in the context of performance constrains, at an early stage in the development process. Thereby, no domain specific knowledge concerning the underlying performance evaluation approach is required by users of this method.