A simulation process for asynchronous event processing systems: Evaluating performance and availability in transaction models

Simulation is essential for understanding the performance and availability behavior of complex systems, but there are significant difficulties when trying to simulate systems with multiple components, which interact with asynchronous communication. A systematic process is needed, in order to cope with the complexity of asynchronous event processing and the failure semantics of the interacting components. We address this problem by introducing an approach that combines formal techniques for faithful representation of the complex system effects and a statistical analysis for simultaneously studying multiple simulation outcomes, in order to interpret them. Our process has been successfully applied to a synthetic workload for distributed transaction processing. We outline the steps followed towards generating a credible simulation model and subsequently we report and interpret the results of the applied statistical analysis. This serves as a proof of concept that the proposed simulation process can be also effective in other asynchronous system contexts, like for example distributed group communication systems, file systems and so on.