Architecture Diagrams: A Graphical Language for Architecture Style Specification
This work addresses the need for more intuitive and efficient specification methods in software architecture, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing configuration logics.
The authors tackled the problem of specifying architecture styles by proposing a graphical notation, architecture diagrams, to enhance readability and ease of expression, and they developed a polynomial-time algorithm for checking conformance to specified styles.
Architecture styles characterise families of architectures sharing common characteristics. We have recently proposed configuration logics for architecture style specification. In this paper, we study a graphical notation to enhance readability and easiness of expression. We study simple architecture diagrams and a more expressive extension, interval architecture diagrams. For each type of diagrams, we present its semantics, a set of necessary and sufficient consistency conditions and a method that allows to characterise compositionally the specified architectures. We provide several examples illustrating the application of the results. We also present a polynomial-time algorithm for checking that a given architecture conforms to the architecture style specified by a diagram.