Intelligent instrument design with ArchWare ADL

This paper presents a concrete application case of an architecture-centric development process to the design of the intelligent instruments software. Intelligent instruments are sensors, actuators or controllers able to deliver complex services such as diagnostic, validation, communication, and learning, in order to jointly control a physical system. The design of such instruments requires skills and competencies in physics, mechanics and computing sciences. Most of the time, the instrument designer is a domain expert rather than a software expert although strong constraints coming from the instrument hardware are imposed at the software level. In this paper, we present a formal specific design language which was constructed using the ArchWare ADL language family. Using a formal approach, all the needed properties can be specified in a scalable manner in the design phase. In addition the architecture centric vision eases the development process for instrument designer from instruments specification to source code generation