Modeling and Recovering Hierarchical Structural Architectures of ROS 2 Systems from Code and Launch Configurations using LLM-based Agents
Abstract
Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) relies on explicit architecture models to document and evolve systems across abstraction levels. For ROS~2, subsystem structure is often encoded implicitly in distributed configuration artifacts -- most notably launch files -- making hierarchical structural decomposition hard to capture and maintain. Existing ROS~2 modeling approaches cover node-level entities and wiring, but do not make hierarchical structural (de-)composition a first-class architectural view independent of launch artifacts. We contribute (1) a UML-based modeling concept for hierarchical structural architectures of ROS~2 systems and (2) a blueprint-guided automated recovery pipeline that reconstructs such models from code and configuration artifacts by combining deterministic extraction with LLM-based agents. The ROS~2 architectural blueprint (nodes, topics, interfaces, launch-induced wiring) is encoded as structural contracts to constrain synthesis and enable deterministic validation, improving reliability. We evaluate the approach on three ROS~2 repositories, including an industrial-scale code subset. Results show high precision across abstraction levels, while subsystem-level recall drops with repository complexity due to implicit launch semantics, making high-level recovery the remaining challenge.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.18644,
title = {Modeling and Recovering Hierarchical Structural Architectures of ROS 2 Systems from Code and Launch Configurations using LLM-based Agents},
author = {Mohamed Benchat and Dominique Briechle and Raj Chanchad and Mitbhai Chauhan and Meet Chavda and Ruidi He and Dhruv Jajadiya and Dhruv Kapadiya and Nidhiben Kaswala and Daniel Osterholz and Andreas Rausch and Meng Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.18644},
year = {2026}
}