Abstract. We describe a novel performability modelling approach which facilitates the efficient solution of performance models extracted from high-level descriptions of systems. The notation which we use for our high-level designs is the UML graphical modelling language. The technology which provides the efficient representation capability for the underlying performance model is the MTBDD-based PRISM probabilistic model checker. The UML models are compiled through an intermediate language, the stochastic process algebra PEPA, before translation into MTBDDs for solution. We illustrate our approach on a real-world analysis problem from the domain of mobile telephony. 1 Introduction Distributed, mobile and global computing environments provide robust development challenges to practising software system developers. Working with rapidlychanging implementation technology means that developers often must spend some of their development time finding and correcting errors in the software libraries and APIs which they use. Fortifying this difficulty is the arduous terrain of dynamic distributed systems where the difficulty of replaying a communication sequence which led to a system fault confounds the process of detecting and correcting implementation errors. In this setting, application developers rarely wish to expend the investment of time which would be needed to build and analyse a performance model of the system which they are developing. The concepts and the modelling languages of performance analysis are relatively unfamiliar to software developers and when already faced with a generous range of other difficulties in the development process, early predictive performance analysis can easily be overlooked
