An Environment for Developing Simulatable AADL-DEVS Models

Reducing complexity in system architecture and design specifications, and more specifically from the software aspect, is essential. The architecture specifications focus on what the requirements and static aspects of systems are. The design specifications define dynamic aspects of computational components that sense and react to external stimuli. As the architecture and design specifications serve complementary roles in developing systems, the use of Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) and Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) is proposed for developing, in a step-wise fashion, combined architecture and design models. The proposed AADL-DEVS framework is grounded in the foundational modularity and hierarchy principles common to the AADL and DEVS modeling approaches. A realization of this framework capable of transforming and simulating the AADL-DEVS specifications is developed using the Open Source AADL Tool Environment (OSATE) and DEVS-Suite simulator. The scope of this paper is on the computational aspect of systems. The proposed AADL-DEVS framework is demonstrated using a model for the software part of an infant incubator, a time-sensitive and safety–critical system.