Providing Architectural Languages and Tools Interoperability through Model Transformation Technologies

Abstract

Many architectural languages have been proposed in the last fifteen years, each one with the chief aim of becoming the ideal language for specifying software architectures. What is evident nowadays, instead, is that architectural languages are defined by stakeholder concerns. Capturing all such concerns within a single, narrowly focused notation is impossible. At the same time it is also impractical to define and use a “universal” notation, such as UML. As a result, many domain specific notations for architectural modeling have been proposed, each one focusing on a specific application domain, analysis type, or modeling environment. As a drawback, a proliferation of languages exists, each one with its own specific notation, tools, and domain specificity. No effective interoperability is possible to date. Therefore, if a software architect has to model a concern not supported by his own language/tool, he has to manually transform (and eventually keep aligned) the available architectural specification into the required language/tool. DUALLY is an automated framework that allows architectural languages and tools interoperability. Given a number of architectural languages and tools, they can all interoperate thanks to automated model transformation techniques. DUALLY is implemented as an Eclipse plugin.

Biography

Patrizio Pelliccione received the PhD degree from the Computer Science Department at the University of L’Aquila, where he is an assistant professor. From April 2005 to April 2006, he was a senior researcher on the Faculty of Sciences, Technologies and Communications at the University of Luxembourg. Here he was the coordinator of the CORRECT project and group. The research topics are mainly in software architectures, software architectures verification, component-based systems, fault tolerance, middleware, model checking, and formal methods. He published several papers in journals and international conferences and workshops in these thematics.

Patrizio is founding member of SERENE - Software Engineering for REsilieNt systems - ERCIM (the European Research Consortium for Informatics and Mathematics) Working Group. He is an editor of the book: Software Engineering of Fault Tolerant Systems, and he serves as reviewer on several workshops, conferences, and journals.