23. Possible Tools
Informative
The AADL can be used for a variety of purposes during development.  This informative annex lists examples of tools that are being developed.  The annex also discusses those tools that could be developed as well as suggesting possible uses for the language.
A front-end tool parses and checks specifications for syntactic and internal semantic correctness.  An open source AADL Tool Environment is currently being developed on top of the extensible Eclipse environment (www.eclipse.org).  This toolset includes a text parser, name resolver and consistency checker, an object- based editor, persistent storage of AADL models in XML, and a generator of textual AADL.  A graphical view and analysis plug-in capability are being added.
Component compliance tools support establishment of compliance between an AADL system specification and the physical system. A software component compliance tool might input a software component specification, input the programming text for that component, and verify that the specifications are consistent with the component implementation.  A software component compliance tool might input programming text and hardware models and generate component specifications for those items, or might generate information to be included in a specification (e.g. estimated compute times, estimated fault arrival rates).
System implementation tools support the Processing Requirements and Permissions given in this standard.  A system implementation tool might input an architectural specification and generate the glue code required to integrate the described software components for execution on the described target hardware architecture.
System analysis tools may provide analyses for various categories of behaviors, both those discussed in this standard and elsewhere.  Examples of possible system analysis tools are real- time schedulability analysis tools, reliability analysis tools, safety analysis tools, and event sequencing (discrete concurrent process) analysis tools.