The project is organized into several areas of study: environment architectures and interoperability mechanisms, user interfaces, hypermedia, process (modeling, programming, and execution), object management, measurement and evaluation, language processing, configuration management, and analysis and testing. The analysis area is further subdivided into concurrency analysis, dependence and flow analysis, and analysis tool infrastructure.
Prototypes are used to validate approaches taken in the individual areas as well as to investigate technical interactions between areas.
The Arcadia consortium is comprised of researchers from the University of California, Irvine (UCI), the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (UMass), the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU), and Purdue University.
See the Arcadia philosophy for effective software engineering environments.