Using RMA for evaluating design decisions

Software architecture plays a central role in large, complex software systems with real-time or safety-critical requirements. We are investigating design methods based on software architecture, and techniques to specify, represent, and analyze them. As a practical matter we have decided to focus our architectural research on system structure, communication behavior and specific non-functional properties such as performance, synchronization, architectural integrity, dependency analysis and control. In this paper we show how software architecture can provide support for early performance and schedulability analysis, and how the resulting analysis can also provide feedback to evaluate the design decisions made at the architecture level