The AIDA (Automotive and Industrial Diagnostic Assistance) system is a modular diagnostic system. It consists of three types of components: The top level component (the main AIDA dynamic link library), several protocol components and hardware drivers. At least one component of every type form a so called AIDA stack. A stack is built from the top level component down to a hardware driver. There is one special protocol component: The net component which is able to use the network to link protocol components on other systems running an AIDA server.
See:
Starting with AIDA 7 native Windows applications must provide a valid license file and authentication key to unlock the BSK_AIDA.dll, otherwise none of the stack-related functions can be used. For details see the Licensing/Authentication Overview.