Collaborative LLM Agents for C4 Software Architecture Design Automation
This addresses the problem of automating software architecture design for developers and engineers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing LLM and multi-agent approaches.
The paper tackles the manual and time-consuming process of creating C4 software architecture models by introducing an LLM-based multi-agent system that automates this task, demonstrating fast model creation, high compilation success, and semantic fidelity on five canonical system briefs.
Software architecture design is a fundamental part of creating every software system. Despite its importance, producing a C4 software architecture model, the preferred notation for such architecture, remains manual and time-consuming. We introduce an LLM-based multi-agent system that automates this task by simulating a dialogue between role-specific experts who analyze requirements and generate the Context, Container, and Component views of the C4 model. Quality is assessed with a hybrid evaluation framework: deterministic checks for structural and syntactic integrity and C4 rule consistency, plus semantic and qualitative scoring via an LLM-as-a-Judge approach. Tested on five canonical system briefs, the workflow demonstrates fast C4 model creation, sustains high compilation success, and delivers semantic fidelity. A comparison of four state-of-the-art LLMs shows different strengths relevant to architectural design. This study contributes to automated software architecture design and its evaluation methods.