Over their lifetime, systems exist in many forms, such as instances of a system deployed in different contexts or a system evolving over time. Variability may also occur in terms of functionality reflected in the domain architecture, nonfunctional properties (such as performance, reliability, and safety-criticality) that are realized in the runtime architecture, interfaces to the deployment environment with which the system interfaces, and mapping to computing platforms.

The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) Architecture Analysis & Design Language (AADL) is an industry-standard, architecture-modeling notation specifically designed to support a component-based approach to modeling embedded systems. This technical note discusses how AADL can be used to model system families and configurations of system and component variants. It shows that AADL supports system families by providing component types that are used to specify component interfaces and multiple implementations for each component type. This report also shows that AADL uses properties to represent multiple dimensions of system variability ranging from variation through conditional compilation to variation through different sets of calibration parameters.