Publication

As systems become more software intensive and complex, managing their development and implementation also becomes more complex. Models in development today are isolated, domain-specific artifacts that are created throughout the design lifecycle. A mechanism is needed to integrate the design models with simulation environments as the models are being developed and refined in order to rapidly see the impacts as the design matures. The ability to perform verification, validation, and accreditation (VV&A) early in the modeling process and throughout the lifecycle could greatly improve the model and its contribution. But in order to perform VV&A on complex systems, a precise language would be required to model these systems in an integrated fashion to remove ambiguity and the segmented developmental lifecycle. Objectives of this research included exploring the unique capabilities of Architectural Analysis and Design Language (AADL) for developing high confidence (verified and validated) models as part of a system development lifecycle and to determine the maturity of the AADL tools for VV&A model refinement. To show how AADL could be used to embed the Verification and Validation of architectural models into the development process, an architectural model of the Army’s Systems Integration and Test Laboratory (STIL) was developed and used as a test bed. The results of the research showed that a portion of a real world DoD representative system could be modeled using AADL in a very short time with little previous experience in AADL. AADL’s well-defined semantics supported Architecture/System Design verification by allowing a precise specification of the architecture so that the analysis performed is trustworthy and repeatable.