Extending the Möbius modeling environment with the advanced replication operator

Mobius is well known as a modeling and evaluation environment for performance and dependability indicators. It has been conceived in a modular and flexible fashion, to be easily expanded to incorporate new features, formalisms and tools. The need of modeling systems characterized by a large population of heterogeneous interacting components, which are nowadays more and more common in a variety of application contexts, provided the opportunity to focus on a new operator to efficiently manage non-anonymous replication, as requested for these systems. This tool paper presents the implementation of a new replication operator, called Advanced Rep, in Mobius. Efficiency of Advanced Rep is evaluated against a recently developed alternative solution.