AADL, an SAE Standard

Developed by a Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) sponsored committee of experts, the Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) was approved and published as SAE Standard AS-5506 in November, 2004.

The AADL is designed for the specification, analysis, and automated integration of real-time performance-critical (timing, safety, schedulability, fault tolerant, security, etc.) distributed computer systems. It provides a new vehicle to allow analysis of system designs (and system of systems) prior to development and supports a model-based, model-driven development approach throughout the system life cycle.

The SAE AADL standard can lower development and maintenance costs by

  • providing a standard, precise syntax and semantics for performance-critical systems,  so that documentation can be well defined
  • providing the ability to model large-scale (multi-contractor) architectures from many aspects in a single analyzable model that can be incrementally refined
  • capturing the “architectural API” needed to evaluate the effect of change, such as the emergent properties of integration (e.g., safety, schedulability, end-to-end latency, and security)
  • allowing early and life-cycle tracking of modeling and analysis
  • analyzing the system structure and runtime behavior rather than functional behavior, complementing functional simulation
  • providing a great complement to reference architectures and component-based or product-line development

The AADL is adaptable by design, providing flexibility through its

  • extensible standard language that permits textual and graphical system representation and the addition of project-specific properties as well as approved sublanguage extensions
  • UML 2.0 profile that presents AADL as a specialized modeling notation within UML framework
  • comprehensive tool support that includes open source and commercial tools

An international industry standard, AADL enjoys growing acceptance in avionics, aerospace, automotive, and robotics communities. Organizations such as the SEI, Airbus, Honeywell, Rockwell-Collins, the European Space Agency, TNI Europe, and General Dynamics actively xontribute to AADL development.