AO4AADL: Aspect oriented extension for AADL

Abstract

Managing embedded system complexity and scalability is one of the most important problems in software development. To better address this problem, it is very recommended to have an abstraction level high enough to model such systems. Architectural description languages (ADLs) intend to model complex systems and manage their structure at a high abstraction level. Traditional ADLs do not normally provide appropriate formalisms to separate any kind of crosscutting concerns. This frequently results in poor descriptions of the software architectures and a tedious adaptation to constantly changing user requirements and specifications. AOSD (Aspect Oriented Software Development) deals with these problems by considering crosscutting concerns in software development. The effectiveness of considering an aspect-oriented architectural design appears when aspect concepts are taken into account early in the software's life-cycle. In this paper, we propose a new aspect language called AO4AADL that adequately manipulates aspect oriented concepts at architecture level in order to master complexity and ensure scalability. The abstract nature of our proposed language allows the generation of aspect code for several programming languages and platforms.