Bridging the Gap between Architecture Specifications and Simulation Models

One of the key architecture-related activities is the evaluation of the architecture drivers and design, and simulation is one mean to automatically assess architecture-significant aspects such as performance. Despite the maturity of the existing architecture specification and simulation techniques, the proper simulation of architecture models is still effort-intensive and time-consuming. This is caused by the usual informality of the architecture specification on the one hand, and by the formalisms required for proper execution of architecture simulations on the other hand. To bridge this gap, we present in this paper a semi-automated approach to support the specification and simulation of architecture drivers and design. The approach has been used in different industrial projects in the field of transportation and smart factories. In this paper, we present an anonymized example centered on the security of software deployment and execution in the transportation domain.