Author(s): Silva, Luís Alexandre Ferreira da
Date: 2008
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/28485
Origin: Repositório Institucional da UNL
Subject(s): Quantitative assessment; infrastructure; System Definition Model; infrastructure complexity; model driven assessment; economic aspects of infrastructures; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Eletrotécnica, Eletrónica e Informática
Several approaches to evaluate IT infrastructure architectures have been proposed, mainly by supplier and consulting firms. However, they do not have a unified approach of these architectures where all stakeholders can cement the decision-making process, thus facilitating comparability as well as the verification of best practices adoption. The main goal of this dissertation is the proposal of a model-based approach to mitigate this problem. A metamodel named SDM (System Definition Model) and expressed with the UML (Unified Modeling Language) is used to represent structural and operational knowledge on the infrastructures. This metamodel is automatically instantiated through the capture of infrastructures configurations of existing distributed architectures, using a proprietary tool and a transformation tool that was built in the scope of this dissertation. The quantitative evaluation is performed using the M2DM (Meta-Model Driven Measurement) approach that uses OCL (Object Constraint Language) to formulate the required metrics. This proposal is expected to increase the understandability of IT infrastructures by all stakeholders (IT architects, application developers, testers, operators and maintenance teams) as well as to allow expressing their strategies of management and evolution. To illustrate the use of the proposed approach, we assess the complexity of some real cases in the diachronic and synchronic perspective.
