DynADL - Dynamic Architecture Description Language for System of Systems
Anton D. Hristozov, Eric T. Matson · 2024
Architecture description languages (ADL), many of them well-established, are popular in the systems and software engineering fields. They all exhibit different strengths, weaknesses, and specializations. Many of them are targeting static architectures with some limited support for dynamic changes of the architecture during run-time. The proposed Architecture Description Language in this paper targets the definition of architectures for system of systems (SoS) that can allow for dynamic changes in each system through manipulation of components during run-time and, therefore, dynamic reconfiguration. The existing modeling tools do not target dynamic reconfiguration of systems and, especially system of systems and could be used through possible extensions or annexes. Examples of such existing languages are SysML and AADL. These capabilities allow for improved system maintenance and adaptive behavior at run-time. The main contribution of this work is achieving these goals through the development of a new specialized language. dynADL and its environment have been developed using Antlr and C++ and have been tested for generating systems in POSIX environments. It is an architecture definition language that is extensible and flexible and has an experimental git repository with C++ source code for the implementation of the tools. The proposed tools allow for code generation of skeleton code for systems of systems that have dynamic behavior.