Design at the Electronic System-Level tackles the increasing complexity of embedded systems by raising the level of abstraction in system specification and modeling. Two important steps in this process are evaluation of a single design configuration and design space exploration. The exponential size of the design space, along with the complex task of simulating a single design point, makes it impossible to explore the design space efficiently in almost all MPSoC design situations. In order to overcome this problem, one or both of the main steps of the design process (i.e., simulation and exploration) must be accelerated. In this paper, for the first part of the design process, high-level analytical models for application mapping and evaluation are presented in order to accelerate the evaluation of a single design configuration. In the second part of the design process, two multi-objective optimization algorithms that are based on particle swarm optimization and simulated annealing have been proposed for performing design space exploration. Considering multimedia applications as case studies, each of these methods produces a set of near-optimal points. Simulation results show that the proposed methods can lead to near-optimal design configurations with acceptable accuracy in a reasonable time.