ABV - A Verifier for the Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL)

Designing and developing mission-critical embedded systems is challenging, especially due to additional platform constraints regarding timing and computational resources. The development process of embedded systems should include verification techniques already at the architecture design phase, to provide evidence that a system´s architecture fulfills its requirements. The Architecture Analysis and Design Language (AADL) is used to model the system´s architecture. Among others, the language contains a Behavior Annex, for describing the behavior of an AADL model, at an abstract level. In this paper, we present a verification tool, called ABV, tailored for AADL models with a behavioral annex. Given an architecture defined in AADL and its behavior specified in the associated language, our tool model-checks the latter against the requirements specified in Computation Tree Logic (CTL). ABV is based on AADL´s formal denotational semantics implemented in Standard ML, and is encapsulated into an Eclipse plug-in based on the OSATE platform. The tool has been applied on the Production Cell case study, which is briefly described in the paper.