Defining anArchitecture DescriptionLanguage for Dassault Systèmes

Architecture Description Languages (ADL) are a major research theme in the software architecture community. Although many interesting proposals have been made, they don’t seem to influence the daily industrial practice. In this paper, we report on an attempt to define an ADL that fits the needs of a specific company: Dassault Systèmes. This company maintains and develops a large body of software with very short cycle times. Their relationship with partners and OEMs has led them to develop the Object Modeler: a component technology for open architecture (Sect. 2). We then give the major requirements on the ADL (Sect. 3), and briefly explain why existing ADLs are not satisfactory in this context (Sect. 4). We finally discuss our approach which takes advantage of the Object Modeler technology to ground the definition of our ADL (Sect. 5). We believe that this strategy for the definition of an ADL is not specific to Dassault Systèmes and the Object Modeler technology, and could be adapted to other component technologies like the Java beans or DCOM.