The development of systems consisting of hardware and software is a challenging task for the system architect. On the one hand, he has to consider an increasing number of system requirements, including the dependencies between them for designing the system architecture; on the other hand, he has to deal with a shortened time-to-market period and requirements changes of the customers up to the implementation phase. This chapter presents a process that enables the architect to validate the system architecture against the architecture-relevant requirements. The process is part of the system design phase and can be integrated in the iterative design of the system architecture. In order to keep track of all requirements, including their dependencies, the architect clusters the requirements according to architecture-specific aspects, the so-called validation targets. For each target he defines examinations processes and check criteria to define the validation status. If all targets are valid, i.e., all check criteria are met by the result of the examination processes, the system architecture itself is valid. Instead of formal validation techniques like model checking, the approach prefers simulations for the examination processes. The approach uses model-based documentation based on the Unified Modeling Language (UML). All data required for the simulations is part of an UML model and extracted to configure and run the simulations. Therefore, changes in the model affect the validation result directly. The process supports the architect in building a system architecture that fulfills the architecture-relevant requirements, and it supports the architect in analyzing the impacts after requirements or architecture changes. A tool facilitates the work effort of the architect by partly automating the major process steps.
The architecture is the basic structure of every system. The system architect is responsible for ensuring that it fits to the system requirements even if these requirements change according to new conditions during development process. Our approach defines a model driven process for the architect to validate system architecture against system requirements and it supports the architect in analysing the impacts of requirements changes.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.