Composition of architectural models: Empirical analysis and language support

Abstract

Managing the architectural description (AD) of a complex software system and maintaining consistency among the different models is a demanding task. To understand the underlying problems, we analyze several non-trivial software architectures. The empirical study shows that a substantial amount of information of ADs is repeated, mainly by integrating information of different models in new models. Closer examination reveals that the absence of rigorously specified dependencies among models and the lack of support for automated composition of models are primary causes of management and consistency problems in software architecture.To tackle these problems, we introduce an approach in which compositions of models, together with relations among models, are explicitly supported in the ADL. We introduce these concepts formally and discuss a proof-of-concept instantiation of composition in xADL and its supporting tools. The approach is evaluated by comparing the original and revised ADs in an empirical study. The study indicates that our approach reduces the number of manually specified elements by 29%, and reduces the number of manual changes to elements for several realistic change scenarios by 52%.

Synthesis of component and connector models from crosscutting structural views

“…This model composition is thus an imperative composition of concrete C&C models rather than a declarative one as in our approach. We believe that our work may benefit as well from a more complex and maybe user specified unification relation across C&C views as suggested in [7].…”

“…Some previous works deal with the analysis or synthesis of component and connector structures, mainly in the context of architectures [6,7,13,19,21]. We discuss these works and compare them to our work below.…”

“…Boucké et al [7] present composition operators for C&C models to avoid the repetition of elements in integrated models. The integration of sets of architecture models is based on a user specified unification relation (marking identical elements across input models) and a submodel relation (e.g., a component is detailed in another model).…”

“…Some previous work deal with the analysis and synthesis of component and connector structures, mainly in the context of architectures [6,7,13,19,21]. Other work deal with synthesizing behavior rather than structure [17,24,31,32].…”

Verifying component and connector models against crosscutting structural views

“…Many works investigate various analyses of C&C models (e.g., differencing and merging [5,10,20], composition [9], etc. ), mainly in the context of architectures.…”