The Role of Dependency Links in Ensuring Architectural View Consistency

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 many useful capabilities but fail to provide support for ensuring view consistency simply because they present a single view of the system. An ADL used for building dependable systems must provide multiple views. For these kinds of 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, which supports multiple views, but we focus 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.