Acme

TLDR

Many architectural description languages exist, but they operate in isolation, hindering tool integration and sharing of architectural descriptions. The paper presents Acme, a community‑driven common interchange format for architecture design tools, outlining its key features, rationale, and technical innovations. Acme offers a structural framework with annotation facilities that enable subsets of ADL tools to share common architectural information while accommodating tool‑specific extensions.

Abstract

Numerous architectural description languages (ADLs) have been developed, each providing complementary capabilities for architectural development and analysis. Unfortunately, each ADL and supporting toolset operates in isolation, making it difficult to integrate those tools and share architectural descriptions. Acme is being developed as a joint effort of the software architecture research community as a common interchange format for architecture design tools. Acme provides a structural framework for characterizing architectures, together with annotation facilities for additional ADL-specific information. This scheme permits subsets of ADL tools to share architectural information that is jointly understood, while tolerating the presence of information that falls outside their common vocabulary. In this paper we describe Acme's key features, rationale, and technical innovations.