Leading the Growth of an Architectural Modeling Standard
In 2004, the international industry standard SAE Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) was published. Growing from DARPA-funded research into the MetaH and ACME architectural languages a decade or more before, the development of AADL was shepherded by the U.S. Army Aviation and Missile Research Division (AMRDEC) Software Engineering Directorate (SED) with technical leadership by the SEI.
Focusing its research for several years on architectural modeling and analysis for safety- and mission-critical systems, the SEI worked effectively across industry, government, and academic organizations to fashion the initial standard language and subsequent annexes. As technical lead for the standard, the SEI integrated several research technologies into the AADL standard, making it extensible, semantically well defined, and consistent.
Through its creation of the Open Source AADL Tool Environment (OSATE), the SEI has fostered pilot applications of AADL in a range of industrial pilot projects and the use of AADL and OSATE as a technology transition platform—as evidenced by their integration with formal analytical frameworks such as SysML and MARTE.