The ALI Architecture Description Language

Abstract

Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) have emerged over the past two decades as a means to abstract details of large-scale systems in order to enable better intellectual control over the complete systems. Recently, there has been an explosion in the number of ADLs created in the research community. However, industrial adoption of these ADLs has been rather limited. This has been attributed to various reasons, including the lack of support of some ADLs for: variability management, requirements traceability, architectural artefact reusability and multiple architectural views. To overcome these limitations, this paper is a report on ALI, an ADL that was designed to complement existing work by adding mechanisms to address the aforementioned limitations. The ALI design principles, concepts, notations and formal semantics are presented in this paper. The notation is illustrated using two distinct case studies, one from the information systems domain " an Asset Management System (AMS); and another from the embedded systems domain - a Wheel Brake System (WBS).