Architectural specification and analysis of the aegis combat system

Abstract

Software architecture is nowadays considered as a highly important design activity due to enabling the analysis of system behaviours and detecting the design errors before they propagate into implementation. There have been many architecture description languages developed so far that focus on analysing software architectures. However, these languages require the use of process algebras for specifying system behaviours, which are found unfamiliar by practitioners in general. XCD (Connector-centric Design) is one of the most recent languages that is instead based on the well-known Design-by-Contract approach. In this paper, XCD is illustrated in architectural modelling and analysis via the Aegis Combat System case-study. With the Aegis system, it is aimed to show how one of the most common design errors, i.e., the deadlocking components, can be caught in Xcd and prevented in a modular way. In the paper, XCD is also compared with Wright, one of the most influencing architecture description languages, with which Aegis has been specified and analysed for deadlock too.