MReplayer
Majid Babaei, Mojtaba Bagherzadeh, Juergen Dingel · 2020
In this paper, we present MReplayer that supports ordering and replaying of execution traces of distributed systems that are developed using communicated state machine models. Despite the existing solutions that require detailed traces annotated with timestamps (logical or physical), MReplayer only requires a minimum amount of traces without timestamps. Instead, it uses model analysis techniques to order and replay the traces. MReplayer is composed of a set of engines that support an end-to-end solution to trace ordering and replay of distributed systems in three steps: first, a model of a distributed system is instrumented using model transformations to generate execution traces and broadcasts the traces either using a TCP connection or a log file. Second, static analysis of state machine models is performed to extract run-to-completion steps from them. Third, using the information collected (execution traces and rc-steps) in the previous steps, a lightweight centralized version of the distributed system is created and presented to users in a web-based application. We have implemented our approach using UML for Real-time (UML-RT) which is a language specifically designed for real-time embedded systems with soft real-time constraints. Finally, we have evaluated MReplayer against several use cases with various complexities. The result shows that MReplayer can reduce the size of the trace information collected by more than half while incurring similar runtime overhead.