Tailoring the MontiArcAutomaton Component & Connector ADL for Generative Development
This work provides a tailored framework for robotics application development, enabling more efficient reuse and abstraction from implementation details, though it is incremental as it builds on existing C&C ADL concepts.
The paper addresses the limitations of current component & connector architecture description languages in robotics, which often require domain experts to provide behavior descriptions in programming languages or mixed modeling languages and are limited to specific platforms or need extensive handcrafting for transformations. It presents the MontiArcAutomaton framework, which integrates application-specific behavior modeling languages, enables seamless transformation from logical to platform-specific architectures, and supports a-posteriori black-box composition of code generators for various robotics platforms.
Component&connector (C&C) architecture description languages (ADLs) combine component-based software engineering and model-driven engineering to increase reuse and to abstract from implementation details. Applied to robotics application development, current C&C ADLs often require domain experts to provide component behavior descriptions as programming language artifacts or as models of a-priori mixed behavior modeling languages. They are limited to specific target platforms or require extensive handcrafting to transform platform-independent software architecture models into platform-specific implementations. We have developed the MontiArcAutomaton framework that combines structural extension of C&C concepts with integration of application-specific component behavior modeling languages, seamless transformation from logical into platform-specific software architectures, and a-posteriori black-box composition of code generators for different robotics platforms. This paper describes the roles and activities for tailoring MontiArcAutomaton to application-specific demands.