Providing Architectural Languages and Tools Interoperability through Model Transformation Technologies

Many architectural languages have been proposed in the last 15 years, each one with the chief aim of becoming the ideallanguage for specifying software architectures. What is evident nowadays, instead, is that architectural languages are defined bystakeholder concerns. Capturing all such concerns within a single, narrowly focused notation is impossible. At the same time, it is alsoimpractical to define and use a “universal” notation, such as UML. As a result, many domain-specific notations for architecturalmodeling have been proposed, each one focusing on a specific application domain, analysis type, or modeling environment. As adrawback, a proliferation of languages exists, each one with its own specific notation, tools, and domain specificity. No effectiveinteroperability is possible to date. Therefore, if a software architect has to model a concern not supported by his own language/tool, hehas to manually transform (and, eventually, keep aligned) the available architectural specification into the required language/tool. Thispaper presents DUALLY, an automated framework that allows architectural languages and tools interoperability. Given a number ofarchitectural languages and tools, they can all interoperate thanks to automated model transformation techniques. DUALLY isimplemented as an Eclipse plugin. Putting it in practice, we apply the DUALLY approach to the Darwin/FSP ADL and to a UML2.0profile for software architectures. By making use of an industrial complex system, we transform a UML software architecturespecification in Darwin/FSP, make some verifications by using LTSA, and reflect changes required by the verifications back to the UMLspecification.