Decision Buddy

Abstract

Designing a software architecture is a highly complex task and associated with a high degree of uncertainty. There are a variety of reusable and established solutions, but they differ in their impact on the system's functionality and quality. The architect has to consider different aspects like stakeholders' requirements as well as numerous constraints coming, among others, from the technical environment and organization. The context of software evolution sheds a different light on constraints. The existing system with its structure based on previous decisions is a limiting factor constraining the ongoing development. However, current approaches do not sufficiently consider constraints induced by an existing system until now. To assist the architect in taking the right design decisions efficiently, tool support for the recommendation of solutions and structured documentation of the design decisions are indispensable. In our paper, we propose a decision process focusing on the consideration of constraints in evolving systems. Furthermore, we introduce our tool Decision Buddy and show how it contributes to the application of our constraint-based decision process.

Analysis of Safety Requirements Evolution in the Transition of Land Transportation Systems Toward Autonomy

“…In addition to TRIZ and thanks to new methods and computational capabilities for data analysis and decision making, knowledge-based approaches emerged to orient designer during systems evolution. Gerdes et al propose a tool to support constraint-based decision making in the context of systems evolution using previous knowledge about the system for new architectures evaluation (Gerdes et al, 2015). However, the knowledge feed-back for AV is still too small to know architecturally significant factors to efficiently generate and evaluate architectures.…”