Using a subset of AADL to define medical application architectures

by

in
Code Gen Vision
The driving vision behind the MDCF Architect: An app’s architecture is specified in AADL, translated to Java and XML skeletons, and then run on a compatible platform.

Late last year (October-ish) I began working on a way to specify the software architecture of applications (apps) that run on medical application platforms (MAPs).  The specification takes the form of a subset of the Architecture Analysis and Description Language (AADL) and some supporting tooling — namely a plugin for OSATE2 (an Eclipse distribution which supports the editing of AADL) that translates from AADL to runnable MAP (aka Java) code. This work, referred to as the “MDCF Architect,” is part of my research here at K-State, and in fact this task constitutes a large part of my research proficiency exam — the (oral) examination all KSU PhD students must complete in order to become PhD candidates.

The work reached some good milestones in April, culminating in a paper submission to the Software Engineering in Healthcare workshop at this year’s meeting of Foundations of Health Information Engineering and Systems. My paper was accepted, and in about a month I’ll get to go to Washington DC and give my first conference presentation — I’m pretty excited.

Working with AADL, Eclipse, and a host of supporting technologies necessary for sound software engineering (Jenkins for automated building, JUnit for testing, Maven for building, Sphinx for documentation, Pygments for code highlighting, Jacoco for code coverage) was pretty cool, and one of the main reasons I enjoy studying in the SAnToS lab at K-State: not only am I working on the science part of computer science, but the ideas we work on get translated into real-world, publicly distributed tools.  So, while it’s not exactly likely that anyone outside of academia would find this work super interesting (yet!), the project is open-source (under the EPL), and freely available.


Comments

6 responses to “Using a subset of AADL to define medical application architectures”

  1. […] recently mentioned that my current research project is a subset of AADL and an associated Eclipse plug-in which […]

  2. […] a recent post, I wrote about my current research project: a restricted subset of AADL and a translator that […]

  3. […] at the software engineering tools / techniques I used when engineering the MDCF Architect (see my original post). Today I’m going to talk about Sphinx and Pygments — tools used by my research lab for […]

  4. […] I wrote about the project I’m working on, and mentioned the range of technologies used in support of that […]

  5. Yu Jin Kim Avatar
    Yu Jin Kim

    Congratulations for your presentation!

  6. […] few months ago, I wrote about my recent work on defining a subset of the architecture description language AADL to define bits of software […]

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.