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Guided architecture trade space exploration: fusing model-based engineering and design by shopping

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Abstract

Advances in model-based system engineering have greatly increased the predictive power of models and the analyses that can be run on them. At the same time, designs have become more modular and component-based. It can be difficult to manually explore all possible system designs due to the sheer number of possible architectures and configurations; trade space exploration has arisen as a solution to this challenge. In this work, we present a new software tool: the Guided Architecture Trade Space Explorer (GATSE), which connects an existing model-based engineering language (AADL) and modeling environment (OSATE) to an existing trade space exploration tool (ATSV). GATSE, AADL, and OSATE are all designed to be easily extended by users, which enables relatively straightforward domain-customizations. ATSV, combined with these customizations, lets system designers “shop” for candidate architectures and interactively explore the architectural trade space according to any quantifiable quality attribute or system characteristic. We evaluate GATSE according to an established framework for variable system architectures, and demonstrate its use on an avionics subsystem.

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Notes

  1. http://www.ellidiss.fr/public/wiki/inspector.

  2. https://www.adventiumlabs.com/our-work/products-services/model-based-engineering-mbe-tools.

  3. https://osate.org.

  4. Though we attempt to adhere to the intuitive meaning behind Koziolek’s definitions, we do not reproduce them in their entirety as they rely heavily on her specific approach and formalization. We elide things like variable or function names; refer to Table 6.3 of her dissertation for the full definitions [31].

  5. Notably, the definition of “demand” is somewhat flexible: Bertolino and Strigini define it as a sequence of inputs and suggest in the avionics domain an entire mission could be considered one demand [8].

  6. https://github.com/osate/osate2-gtse.

  7. To our knowledge, ours is the first open-source implementation of their algorithm.

  8. See the org.osate.gtse.config.* packages in https://github.com/osate/osate2-gtse.

  9. https://www.eclipse.org/Xtext/.

  10. Qualified relative to the extended element, see line 5 of Listing  3.

  11. https://github.com/osate/osate2-gtse/.

  12. https://commons.apache.org/proper/commons-math/.

  13. We note that this is roughly five times faster than the initial reported speed [36]. The speedup is primarily due to improved hardware.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Julien Delange, Min Young Nam, and Peter Feiler for the original concept and feedback; Joseph Seibel for the configuration validator implementation; and the anonymous reviewers for their feedback which has been invaluable in improving this paper. We also gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Gary Stump and Penn State University’s Applied Research Laboratory for their help and the modifications made to ATSV as a result of this effort.

Copyright 2021 Carnegie Mellon University.

This material is based upon work funded and supported by the Department of Defense under Contract No. FA8702-15-D-0002 with Carnegie Mellon University for the operation of the Software Engineering Institute, a federally funded research and development center.

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    Sam Procter & Lutz Wrage

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Communicated by Tao Yue, Man Zhang, and Silvia Abrahao.

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Procter, S., Wrage, L. Guided architecture trade space exploration: fusing model-based engineering and design by shopping. Softw Syst Model 20, 2023–2045 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10270-021-00889-8

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