| Abstract | As the use of distributed systems is spreading, and applications designed for such systems become more and more demanding, optimal design of distributed systems becomes a critical issue. Designing a distributed system has become more complex, due to the number of alternatives for each decision that must be made and because of the existence of many parameters which influence the overal performance of the distributed system. Thus, it is necessary to use software tools, capable of accepting a description of the user's requirements and suggesting solutions to the problem of designing a distributed system which meets the user's requirements. In this paper, we present a disciplined approach to the construction of such a software tool, which combines methods from the Artificial Intelligence domain, that are used in order to design the distributed system, along with simulation techniques, used to estimate the system's overall performance. |
