AQAF: An Architecture Quality Assurance Framework for Systems Modeled in AADL

Architecture engineering is essential to achieve dependability of critical embedded systems and affects large parts of the system life cycle. There is consequently little room for faults, which may cause substantial costs and devastating harm. Verification in architecture engineering should therefore be holistically and systematically managed in the development of critical embedded systems, from requirements analysis and design to implementation and maintenance. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting AQAF: an Architecture Quality Assurance Framework for critical embedded systems modeled in the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL). The framework provides a holistic set of verification techniques with a common formalism and semantic domain, architecture flow graphs and timed automata, enabling completely formal and automated verification processes covering virtually the entire life cycle. The effectiveness and efficiency of the framework are validated in a case study comprising a safety-critical train control system.