Performing dependability evaluation along with other analyses at architectural level allows both making architectural tradeoffs and predicting the effects of architectural decisions on the dependability of an application. This paper gives guidelines
for building architectural dependability models for software systems using the AADL (Architecture Analysis and Design Language). It presents reusable modeling patterns for fault-tolerant applications and shows how the presented patterns can be used in the context of a subsystem of a real-life application.
For efficiency reasons, the software system designers will is to use an integrated set of methods and tools to describe specifications and designs, and also to perform analyses such as dependability, schedulability and performance. AADL (Architecture
Analysis and Design Language) has proved to be efficient for software architecture modeling. In addition, AADL was designed to accommodate several types of analyses. This paper presents an iterative dependency-driven approach for dependability modeling using AADL. It is illustrated on a small example. This approach is part of a complete framework that allows the generation of dependability analysis and evaluation models from AADL models to support the analysis of software and system architectures, in critical application domains.
