Method of Performance Analysis of Time-Critical Applications Using DB-Nets

These days, most of time-critical business processes are performed using computer technologies. For example, one can consider financial processes including trading on stock exchanges powered by electronic communication protocols such as the Financial Information eXchange (FIX) Protocol. One of the main challenges emerging with such processes concerns maintaining the best possible performance since any unspecified delay may cause to a large financial loss or other damage. Therefore, a performance analysis of time-critical systems and applications is required. In the current work, a novel method for a performance analysis of time-critical applications is developed based on the db-net formalism, which combines the ability of colored Petri nets to model a system control flow with the ability to model relational database states. The method allows to conduct a performance analysis for time-critical applications that work as transactional systems and produce log messages representable in the form of table records in a relational database. One of such applications is a trading communication system based on FIX Protocol. This system is considered in this work to demonstrate applicability of the proposed method for time-critical systems performance analysis. The software prototype is developed to test and demonstrate abilities of the method. The prototype is based on an extension of Renew software tool, a reference net simulator. The software prototype is checked on a test log with FIX messages, provided by a software developer of testing solutions for one of the global stock exchanges. An application of the method for quantitative analysis of maximum acceptable delay violations is presented. The developed method can be used for both research purposes and testing real time-critical software systems. The paper contains 58 pages, 4 chapters including introduction and conclusion, 7 figures, 1 table, 14 sources and 3 appendices. Key Words: performance analysis; time-critical applications; db-nets; FIX protocol; software modeling; software testing.