Acme is a general purpose architectural description language (ADL) designed by the ABLE group at CMU. It provides a formal method to describe software architectures, and enables reasoning about the functional and non-functional properties of the system. An accompanying tool, AcmeStudio, provides a GUI that allows visualization and drag-and-drop creation of architectural designs. It is still in development, but a working version can be downloaded from here.

Because the Unified Modeling Language (UML) is a widely used object-oriented design standard, enabling the translation of Acme descriptions to models in UML becomes important for object-oriented designers who also wish to benefit from the strengths of Acme. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a tool to automate this translation. Facilitating the translation of architectural designs to object-oriented models would encourage the use of architectural designs and benefit the software design community.

The current focus is to implement a tool to automate the translation of Acme to the Petal format used by Rational Rose Real-Time. Timeline of project follows:

• Sept 2000, project began.
• Dec 2000, a basic mapping established for the basic Acme elements of component, connector, port, and role.
• Jan 2001, a report drafted for publication.
• Mar 2001, a paper submitted to the 2001 Parallel Distributed Processing Techniques and Application Conference, Distributed Software Architecture session.
• Apr 2001, PDPTA accepted paper.
• May 2001, implementation of translation tool began.
• Jun 2001, translation tool prototype completed, with basic mapping capability, in time for DASADA demo.

• Brochure
• Captured images of an example system before and after translation (both models manually drawn), click for full-size:
  
  
  
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