SADL: Simulation Architecture Description Language

This paper introduces the Simulation Architecture Description Language (SADL) developed at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Marshall Space Flight Center to support the real-time simulation of advanced avionics systems. SADL is a graphical, domain-specific Architecture Description Language (ADL) that facilitates the high-level specification of both the software and hardware aspects of hard real-time avionics system simulations targeted for execution on diverse hardware architectures, including multiprocessor systems. It supports the hierarchical expression of the architecture of an entire simulation at various levels of abstraction. A detailed description of SADL is provided along with a case study that illustrates its ability to represent real-world simulations.