Describing software architectures by system structure and properties

Abstract

To support architecture-based development, different modeling notations and languages, so-called architecture description languages (ADLs), have been designed. To be of help in the development process, software architectures must be described in a complete and consistent manner but without being overloaded with information provided to the system stakeholders. Current architecture description languages provide information about software architectures in a domain independent way. This may lead to inappropriate and incomplete descriptions of software architectures. In this paper, we introduce a flexible and extensible language called Architecture Structure Description Language (ASDL) developed for describing structural aspects of software architectures and their properties. We thereby focus on the domain of embedded real-time systems that have to meet certain timing and safety constraints. The language was developed in an architecture recovery process of a realworld Train Control System (TCS) and has been used to describe and reason about TCS's architecture.

The analysis of architectural languages for the needs of practitioners

“…AADL, 14,15 EAADL, 96 East-ADL 32 Annex libraries X MontiArc 104,105 Language inheritance X Acme, 35,36 Aspectual Acme, 37 Armani, 183 Property annotation X ASDL (Structure) 184 Secure X-ADL, 34 X-ADL, 42 XC2, 42 Mae, 90 XML X ADML, 79 XAcme 185 SOFA 156,157 Aspect-oriented development X Korrigan, 89 LISA 186 Tool support X UML, 172 ArchiMate 181,182 UML profiles and stereotypes X SADL (Structure) 78 Subtyping and algebraic extension X X nonfunctional properties), extending tool support with the necessary facilities (eg, formal analysis, simulation, and code generation), adding/removing new elements (eg, complex connectors), or introducing a subnotation (eg, a visual notation set). Table 11 shows the 20 different ALs (16%) that support extensibility and customization and also groups the extensible ALs by the extension mechanisms employed and the type of the extension.…”

Component-wise mapping of media-needs to a distributed presentation environment

“…We have some drawing conventions of our own, which is derived from ADL Darwin [4,5]. We use In an interactive presentation system, it is necessary to distinguish user interface channels from data streaming channels.…”