Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Architecture description language
Summary
Architecture description languages (ADLs) are used in several disciplines: system engineering, software engineering, and enterprise modelling and engineering.
The system engineering community uses an architecture description language as a language and/or a conceptual model to describe and represent system architectures.
The software engineering community uses an architecture description language as a computer language to create a description of a software architecture. In the case of a so-called technical architecture, the architecture must be communicated to software developers; a functional architecture is communicated to various stakeholders and users. Some ADLs that have been developed are: Acme (developed by CMU), AADL (standardized by the SAE), C2 (developed by UCI), SBC-ADL (developed by National Sun Yat-Sen University), Darwin (developed by Imperial College London), and Wright (developed by CMU).
The ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010 document, Systems and software engineering—Architecture description, defines an architecture description language as "any form of expression for use in architecture descriptions" and specifies minimum requirements on ADLs.
The enterprise modelling and engineering community have also developed architecture description languages catered for at the enterprise level. Examples include ArchiMate (now a standard of The Open Group), DEMO, ABACUS (developed by the University of Technology, Sydney). These languages do not necessarily refer to software components, etc. Most of them, however, refer to an application architecture as the architecture that is communicated to the software engineers.
Most of the writing below refers primarily to the perspective from the software engineering community.
A standard notation (ADL) for representing architectures helps promote mutual communication, the embodiment of early design decisions, and the creation of a transferable abstraction of a system. Architectures in the past were largely represented by box-and-line drawing annotated with such things as the nature of the component, properties, semantics of connections, and overall system behavior.
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.