Usefulness of software architecture description languages for modeling and analysis of federates and federation architectures
Software architecture is high-level software design dealing with the structure and organization of large software systems. Architecture description languages (ADLs) are languages designed to represent software designs at the architecture level. ADLs are not widely used in the development of simulation systems. This research investigates the utility and effectiveness of ADLs for architecture-level design and analysis of simulation systems. Experimental applications of two ADLs to the specification and analysis of simulation architectures were conducted. Rapide was used to model the EnviroFed federation architecture and analyze data volume with and without interest management. Acme was used to model the ModSAF federate architecture and to analyze execution time at the component and federate levels in ModSAF The experiments showed that ADLs could be used to discover important features of simulation system architectures.
software architecture architecture description languages performance analysis