Aspect Oriented Modeling of Component Architectures Using AADL

Dependable embedded software system design is fastidious because designers have to understand and handle multiple, interdependent, pervasive dependability concerns such as fault tolerance, timeliness, performance, security. Because these concerns tend to crosscut application architecture, understanding and changing their descriptions can be difficult. Separating theses concerns at architectural level allow the designers to locate them, to understand them and thus to preserve the required properties when making the change in order to keep the architecture consistent. That separation of concerns leads to better understanding, reuse, analysis and evolution of these concerns during design. The Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) is a standard architecture description language in use by a number of organizations around the world to design, analyze embedded software architectures and generate application code. In this paper we explain how aspect oriented modeling (AOM) techniques and AADL can be used to model dependability aspects of component architecture separately from other aspects. The AOM architectural model used to illustrate the approach in this paper consists of a component primary view describing the base architecture and a component template aspect model describing a fault tolerance concern that provides error detection and recovery services.