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Tutorial

SAE Architecture Analysis and Design Language

Joyce L Tokar, Pyrrhus Software. Bruce Lewis, US Army—AMRDEC
Monday June 20th, afternoon

The Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) is an architecture description language (ADL) that has been developed under the auspices of the International Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), Avionics Systems Division (ASD) Embedded Computing Systems Committee (AS-2). The AADL was approved as an SAE standard in November of 2004.

The language has been defined to provide a consistent and concise notation, both textual and graphical, to be used to develop models of complex, real-time, critical systems such as those used in automotive, avionics, medical, robotic, and space-based systems. The AADL provides the notation to perform various types of analysis of the complex critical systems.

In the early stages of design, the AADL enables the definition of the preliminary connectivity between application and execution platform components. As an AADL model is developed, additional components and properties are specified. The properties provide the information needed by analysis tools to determine the behavior and performance of the system being modeled. The AADL has been designed to facilitate the development of tools that provide automatic code generation of the system both in terms of the application software components and the underlying execution environment. The AADL may be used to verify an actual system against the specified model.

With automatic code generation, the AADL offers a system model that maintains significant information about a system that is useful throughout the lifetime of the system. Thus, the AADL offers support for all stages of system development.

This tutorial will provide an introduction to the AADL language from a textual and graphical perspective. It will also demonstrate the relationship between existing systems and AADL models. The tutorial will present several uses of the AADL in the design and analysis of safety-critical real-time systems. The tutorial will also demonstrate the relationship between AADL models and UML models.

Why should you attend this tutorial?

The AADL is designed to support the declaration and analysis of systems comprised of software and hardware modules. As such, an understanding of AADL how software and execution platform components are represented and how they interact in an AADL model is beneficial to a variety of users.

This tutorial is useful to software and systems managers responsible for the development and integration of complex critical systems. This tutorial will provide a tool vendor with the information necessary to develop tools to support the development and analysis of source code and AADL models. Programmers will learn about the relationship between source code and the corresponding AADL specifications. This tutorial will be useful to system integrators who are responsible for development a definition of the form of components that are acceptable for integration.

This tutorial is suitable for senior software and systems engineers as an introductory course; the tutorial does not presume prior knowledge of AADL. The attendees should have an understanding of the fundamentals of the development of complex, critical real-time systems.

Attendees may learn more about AADL at http://www.aadl.info/.

Presenter

Joyce Tokar has invested more than seventeen years of research and development in the improvement of embedded systems technology, high level computing languages, and software and systems architectures. A recognized leader in the embedded systems community, Dr. Tokar has received numerous awards for her contributions including the Outstanding Ada Community Contribution Award' 2000 . Dr. Tokar has co-authored numerous papers and reports including the Society of Automotive Engineering Architecture Analysis and Description Language standard. Dr. Tokar received her PhD in Computer Engineering from Clemson University. She holds an MS and a BS in Computer Science from the University of Pittsburgh.

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Bruce Lewis is a senior experimental developer for the US Army's Aviation and Missile Command, Research, Development and Engineering Laboratory, Software Engineering Directorate (SED). His work has focused on software architecture, reuse, and system evolution since 1991. He has served as the government lead on various DARPA projects related to ADLs and real-time systems, including those developing MetaH. He is the chairman of the AADL standardization committee.


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