Interpretation of Behaviour Models at Runtime

Modelling system behaviour by means of statecharts is an established practice in software engineering. With such an approach, engineers usually employ code generation to create software components. Although this yields components with a good runtime performance, the resulting system behaviour is static. Changes to the behaviour model necessarily provoke an iteration in the code generation workflow and a re-deployment of the generated artefacts. This book investigates the utilisation of interpretation techniques for the runtime execution of behaviour models, which enables the adaptability of a system’s runtime behaviour on the level of single model elements. The author devises concepts for behaviour model interpretation, which are used to demonstrate the feasibility of the approach. For a quantitative assessment of the approach a novel benchmark is introduced and a performance comparison between interpreted behaviour models and generated code is presented. A qualitative assessment is described, based on uses cases from the area of network and systems management.