Disciplined approach towards the design of distributed systems

As the use of Distributed Systems is spreading widely and relevant applications become more demanding, efficient design of Distributed Systems has turned to be a critical issue. For achieving the desirable integration of Distributed System components, knowledge from different areas must be combined leading to increasing complexity. Construction and provision of the appropriate software tools may facilitate the design and evaluation of Distributed Systems architectures. In this paper the architecture and functionality of the Intelligent Distributed System Design tool (IDIS) are presented. IDIS integrates methodologies and techniques from the Artificial Intelligence and Simulation domain, in order to provide a uniform environment for proposing alternative architectural solutions and evaluating their performance.