A Comparative Analysis Between SysML and AADL When Modeling a Real-Time System
Résumé
System Architecture has a primary role in communication between stakeholders, in addition to planning and structuring the whole architectural process. Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) should be helping within architectural activities. However, most ADLs have not yet been widely used in industry. Another limiting factor for the effective use of ADLs is the difficulty of these languages in concretely expressing complex systems architecture. Considering this situation for the effective use of ADLs, UML has been often used in past years for architecture modeling. However, UML itself presents difficulties in representing characteristics which are pertinent to real-time systems, such as security or real-time restrictions. One of the advantages of UML is its extensibility, ability which allows creation of profiles. Thus, this work presents the Systems Modeling Language (SysML), a UML profile used for system architecture modeling. SysML and Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) languages were both applied to a case and compared. As a conclusion, it was noticed that SysML is better than AADL when modeling abstract characteristics, such as decision making and loops functionality, which are not well-described in AADL.