Automatic dependability analysis for supporting design decisions in UML

Even though a thorough system specification improves the quality of the design, it is not sufficient to guarantee that a system will satisfy its reliability targets. Within this paper, we present an application example of one of the activities performed in the European ESPRIT project HIDE, aiming at the creation of an integrated environment where design toolsets based on UML are augmented with modeling and analysis tools for the automatic validation of the system under design. We apply an automatic transformation from UML diagrams to Timed Petri Nets for model based dependability evaluation. It allows a designer to use UML as a front-end for the specification of both the system and the user requirements, and to evaluate dependability figures of the system since the early phases of the design, thus obtaining precious clues for design refinement. The transformation completely hides the mathematical background, thus eliminating the need for a specific expertise in abstract mathematics and the tedious remodeling of the system for mathematical analysis.