Modern systems modelling languages frequently support the use of multiple views in order to provide flexible, extensible, and rich mechanisms for capturing system characteristics. Architectural description languages (ADLs) often provide these capabilities but generally fail to provide support for ensuring view consistency. When using ADLs for building dependable systems, ensuring view consistency is critical so as to provide guarantees about the system as a whole. In this paper, we outline an architectural modelling language, AIM, focusing on its first-class support for dependency links, which are used to ensure view consistency. We illustrate the principles on examples from a real engine control system.
Alek Radjenovic, Richard F. Paige