Arcadia (engineering)

Current approaches rather focus on functional analysis, system design, justification of architectural choices, and verification steps.

As an answer to this challenge, the ARCADIA method was created by Thales in 2007, placing architecture and collaboration at the center of systems engineering practices.

At the same time it is adaptable to the processes and constraints linked to various types of life cycles such as bottom-up approach, application reuse, incremental, iterative and partial development.

Even if textual requirements are kept as a support for part of customer need capture, ARCADIA favors functional analysis as the major way to formalize the need and solution behavior.

The ARCADIA method and the underlying tools are used to identify functional chains, their overlapping scenarios and desired performance, along with their support by the architecture.

Starting with the first level of system analysis, they ensure traceability throughout the process definition and check each proposed architectural design against expected performance and constraints.

Then the architecture model is automatically analyzed to verify that it meets these constraints, thanks to dedicated expert rules (performance computation, resource consumption, safety or security barriers, etc.).

The first level views used to elaborate and share the architecture model are described below: The first step focuses on analysing the customer needs and goals, expected missions and activities, far beyond System/SW requirements.

It also checks for feasibility (including cost, schedule and technology readiness) of customer requirements, and if necessary gives means to renegotiate their contents.

In order for this breakdown in components to be stable in further steps, all major [non-functional] constraints (safety, security, performance, IVV, Cost, non technical, etc.)

The fifth and last step is a contribution to EPBS (End-Product Breakdown Structure) building, taking benefits from the former architectural work, to enforce components requirements definition, and prepare a secured IVVQ.