A survey of architecture description languages

TLDR

Architecture description languages are increasingly used to formally represent system architectures, yet they differ widely in supported abstractions, analysis capabilities, and even many non‑ADL languages can serve this purpose. This paper presents an ongoing taxonomic survey of ADLs. The survey classifies ADLs by the systems they support, their intrinsic properties, and the processes and technologies they provide for representation, refinement, analysis, and system construction. Early results identify the defining characteristics of an ADL and highlight differences among contemporary ADLs.

Abstract

Architecture description languages (ADLs) are emerging as viable tools for formally representing the architectures of systems. While growing in number, they vary widely in terms of the abstractions they support and analysis capabilities they provide. Further, many languages not originally designed as ADLs serve reasonably well at representing and analyzing software architectures. This paper summarizes a taxonomic survey of ADLs that is in progress. The survey characterizes ADLs in terms of: the classes of systems they support; the inherent properties of the languages themselves; and the process and technology support they provide to represent, refine, analyze, and build systems from an architecture. Preliminary results allow us to draw conclusions about what constitutes an ADL, and how contemporary ADLs differ from each other.