Simulation of Safety-Critical Systems Specified in AADL

Safety-critical software intensive systems are used in a lot of industries nowadays. Examples ofthese are in automotive and aircraft industry, medicine, and autonomous systems. Fault in suchsystems can lead to severe damage and/or loss of human lives. Therefore fault-tolerance should beconsidered at all stages of the system development, starting from the analysis and design.Different languages and tools have been developed for that purpose across the years. One of these isthe Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) – a modeling language used to describethe architecture of a software system. It consists of textual and graphical descriptions of three typesof components – software, execution platform and composite.In this work we implement a prototype of an AADL simulator in Java that enables us to examine thepossible dynamic executions of an AADL specification. This allows us to verify the correctness ofan AADL specification based on the behavior it shows. The simulator would expect an AADLspecification of a software system as an input and simulate the dynamic execution of that system.Before implementing the simulator, we introduce the problem area - safety-critical systems andAADL. Since AADL is used primarily in the automotive and aircraft industries, we have chosen todescribe a simplified flight control system for a plane. It should give the reader an initialunderstanding of the language without going into unnecessary detail about rarely used features.Part of the simulator is a compiler that reads the AADL specification, validates it and transforms itto a Java model. We take a look at the individual steps needed for that, with focus on parsing theinput. Therefore we review the different kinds of algorithms used for parsing and explore how theywork.We also make a detailed literature review of previous works in the area of AADL modeltransformations. Finally, we describe the analysis, design and implementation of the simulator andexamine a case study to test the prototype