Architecture description language. Different communities use the term “architecture description language”: system engineering, software engineering, or enterprise modelling and engineering.
The ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010,[1] document Systems and software engineering—Architecture description, defines an Architecture Description Language as any form of expression for use in architecture descriptions and specifies minimum requirements on ADLs. The enterprise modelling and engineering community have also developed architecture description languages catered for at the enterprise level.
Examples include ArchiMate (now a standard of The Open Group), DEMO, ABACUS (developed by the University of Technology, Sydney) etc. These languages do not necessarily refer to software components, etc. Most of them, however, refer to an application architecture as the architecture that is communicated to the software engineers.
Architecture Analysis & Design Language. The Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) is an architecture description language standardized by SAE.[1] AADL was first developed in the field of avionics, and was known formerly as the Avionics Architecture Description Language.[2] The Architecture Analysis & Design Language is derived from MetaH, an architecture description language made by the Advanced Technology Center of Honeywell.
AADL is used to model the software and hardware architecture of an embedded, real-time system. Due to its emphasis on the embedded domain, AADL contains constructs for modeling both software and hardware components (with the hardware components named "execution platform" components within the standard). This architecture model can then be used either as a design documentation, for analyses (such as schedulability and flow control) or for code generation (of the software portion), like UML. [citation needed]