The growing complexity of applications, combined with constant quality and time-to-market constraints, creates new challenges for performance engineering practices in the area of real-time embedded systems. It is namely expected that delivered products implement more and more complex features, while respecting strict real-time requirements. When developing such real-time systems according to a traditional application of the "V"-cycle, performance verification and validation activities start

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... when development and integration are completed. As a consequence, performance issues are not detected until the validation and verification stage starts. At this time, they are more difficult and expensive to fix. Thus, a reliable performance prediction at early design stages is essential to guarantee that the designed system meets its timing requirements before time and resources are invested for the system implementation. However, this is not an easy task due the lack of methodologies allowing to directly apply performance engineering activities to design models.