VSA reduces the amount of software-engineering support required to develop an executable architecture. It provides a complete set of tools to model and analyze any architecture. It is generally accepted that architectures created by subject matter experts (SMEs) are more robust than those created by software engineers. Providing SMEs with the capability of expressing complex mathematics and logic without the use of high-level computer language is one of the main benefits of VSA. The following benefits are immediately recognized when using VSA:

Minimizes the need for extensive software experience
Allows architects/SMEs to concentrate on the business problem as opposed to software development
Cuts the cost of architecture development in half
Cuts the cost of the final product by simulating it in initial stages
Significantly increases the contributions of Subject Matter Experts thereby creating more robust
executable architectures
Increases the readability of graphical architectures for better presentation to stakeholders
Develops an ?icon based? architecture tool that requires minimal knowledge of formal mathematics
Supports architecture development in a collaborative environment
Facilitates architects by providing useful summary information and reports

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Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) can create architectures with little knowledge and experience in Software Engineering.
At the same time SMEs can use their unique skills and knowledge, in the area of their expertise, to better concentrate on solving a particular problem.

VSO provides a wide range of tools to help SMEs including:

Analysis through execution
Simple but powerful architecture representation based on Petri Nets
Scripting capabilities through Visual Basic or C++

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VSO can be used as a representational tool to ensure Customer and Management involvement at the highest level of fidelity. At the same time, the most important features of VSO is to prove concept and feasibility of a product and cut cost and time of development through product prototyping and simulation. The visual representation of the architecture includes:

Image driven architecture presentation – icons can be assigned to architecture elements
Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) support – all 26 DoDAF views
Reporting, Animation

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The primary use of VSO is to prototype, evaluate and analyze a product it in order to establish the concept or feasibility of the product. Analysis is done concurrently through simulation and includes:

Visualization and Animation of architecture components
Breakpoints at important logical points of the architecture simulation
Export of xml data produced by the simulation engine

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"Petri Nets present two interesting characteristics. Firstly, they make it possible to model and visualize behaviors with parallelism, concurrency, synchronization and resource sharing. Secondly, the theoretical results concerning them are plentiful; the properties of these nets have been and still are extensively studied.”

Discrete, Continuous and Hybrid Petri-Nets
R. David & H. Alla

Contains a very simple set of primitives (places, transitions, arcs and tokens)
Graphically Based
Able to model concurrency, synchronization, multiple parallel threads
Easy to learn and easy to use
Well-established set of users (Government and Commercial)
Firm Mathematical Foundation
Directly Convertible to Executable Architectures
Organic in that two Petri Nets can be combined to make a third one

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The primary use of VSO is to prototype, evaluate and analyze a product it in order to establish the concept or feasibility of the product. Analysis is done concurrently through simulation and includes:

Visualization and Animation of architecture components
Breakpoints at important logical points of the architecture simulation
Export of xml data produced by the simulation engine

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VSO allows SMEs to create simple Visual Basic scripts, or to use the expertise of a Software Engineer and create powerful scripting through external C++ dynamic linked libraries (DLLs). This approach allows for the connection between a picture based architecture and its advanced simulation. At the same time scripting is optimized since it is compiled, therefore achieving best performance. The software engineer?s role can be viewed as supportive to the SME. Software development is done at the single execution unit level, therefore the proper results can be controlled by the SME.

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Scripting through C++ provides VSO users access to high performance precompiled execution units.
Scripting through C++ or Visual Basic Script facilitates.

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