AADL for Cyber-Physical Systems: Semantics and beyond, validate what's next

The SAE Architecture Analysis and Design Language is a design-by-committee standard promoted to help the space and avionics domain. It now extends to a much broader audience, and this language is used in many domains related to Cyber-Physical Systems. AADL is an ADL promoted in the context of Model-Driven Engineering which has now gained a significant momentum in the industry. Models are a valuable asset that should be used and preserved down to the construction of the final system; modeling time and effort should be reduced to focus directly on the system and its realization. Yet, validation & verification may require many different analysis models, involving a strong theoretical background to be mastered. The SAE AADL has been defined to match the concepts understood by any engineer (interface, software or hardware components, packages, generics). From these concepts, typical behavior elements (scheduling and dispatch, communication mechanisms) have been added using both formal and informal description, always bound to theoretical frameworks for V&V. In parallel, the AADL allows one to attach user-defined properties or languages for specific analysis. This enables the application of many different techniques for the analysis of AADL models, among which schedulability, safety, security, fault-propagation, model-checking, resource dimensioning, etc.; but also code generation. In this talk, we give an overview of the AADL, and discuss how to use its features to analyse in depth a CPS case study