Architecture Description Languages (ADL) are formal languages which are designed to describe the architecture of software-intensive systems. There is some controversy about what an ADL is and what architecture exactly means. Although it is not the original intention of ADLs, they tend to be used for component-based systems. The underlying idea is that software development should not focus on the writing of lines-of-code, but on a higher-level system architecture. The architecture is built from coarse-grained components and connections between the components.

Software architectures are typically described as box-and-line diagrams. These diagrams consist of boxes representing some kind of components, lines between the boxes representing communication between components and some text describing the meaning of the boxes and lines. The semantics of boxes and lines are changing between diagrams or even within a diagram. Architecture description languages offer a way to express software architectures with formally defined semantics. Thus, they can improve readability and enable tools to analyse the architecture. Tool support can include model checkers, code generators, run-time support tools and tools for the analysis of non-functional properties.

This project wants to be a tiny step to provide the latter kind of tools. The architecture description language RADL was used to create a formal model of a mobile robotic system and to make worst-case execution time prediction for this robot. See ER1 for more information about the robot or have a look at the project