Guided architecture trade space exploration: fusing model-based engineering and design by shopping

Advances in model-based system engineering have greatly increased the predictive power of models and the analyses that can be run on them. At the same time, designs have become more modular and component-based. It can be difficult to manually explore all possible system designs due to the sheer number of possible architectures and configurations; trade space exploration has arisen as a solution to this challenge. In this work, we present a new software tool: the Guided Architecture Trade Space Explorer (GATSE), which connects an existing model-based engineering language (AADL) and modeling environment (OSATE) to an existing trade space exploration tool (ATSV). GATSE, AADL, and OSATE are all designed to be easily extended by users, which enables relatively straightforward domain-customizations. ATSV, combined with these customizations, lets system designers "shop" for candidate architectures and interactively explore the architectural trade space according to any quantifiable quality attribute or system characteristic. We evaluate GATSE according to an established framework for variable system architectures, and demonstrate its use on an avionics subsystem.