Acme: an architecture description interchange language

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.