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This paper discusses general requirements for architecture definition languages, and describes the syntax and semantics of the subset of the Rapide language that is designed to satisfy these requirements. Rapide is a concurrent event-based simulation language for defining and simulating the behavior of system architectures. Rapide is intended for modelling the architectures of concurrent and distributed systems, both hardware and software. In order to represent the behavior of distributed systems in as much detail as possible, Rapide is designed to make the greatest possible use of event-based modelling by producing causal event simulations. When a Rapide model is executed it produces a simulation that shows not only the events that make up the model's behavior, and their timestamps, but also which events caused other events, and which events happened independently. The architecture definition features of Rapide are described here: event patterns, interfaces, architectures and event pattern mappings. The use of these features to build causal event models of both static and dynamic architectures is illustrated by a series of simple examples from both software and hardware. Also we give a detailed example of the use of event pattern mappings to define the relationship between two architectures at different levels of abstraction. Finally, we discuss briefly how Rapide is related to other event-based languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The development of correct specifications is a critical task in the software development process. This paper describes an alternative approach for the development of specifications. The approach relies on a specification language for abstract data types and a synthesis system. The system is capable of translating an abstract data type specification into an executable program. This process defines an alternative methodology that provides the necessary tools for the early testing of the specifications and for the development of prototypes and implementation models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]