Transforming Platform-Independent to Platform-Specific Component and Connector Software Architecture Models

TL;DR

This paper presents an automated method to convert platform-independent software architecture models into platform-specific models, enhancing reuse and reducing maintenance effort across multiple platforms.

Contribution

It introduces an automated transformation approach that refines logical architectures with platform-specific components before code generation, enabling reuse across platforms.

Findings

Enables reuse of architecture models across multiple platforms.

Reduces manual effort in platform-specific architecture development.

Increases architecture maturity and maintainability.

Abstract

Combining component & connector architecture descriptionlanguageswithcomponentbehaviormodelinglanguages enables modeling great parts of software architectures platformindependently. Nontrivial systems typically contain components with programming language behavior descriptions to interface with APIs. These components tie the complete software architecture to a specific platform and thus hamper reuse. Previous work on software architecture reuse with multiple platforms either requires platform-specific handcrafting or the effort of explicit platform models. We present an automated approach to transform platform-independent, logical software architectures into architectures with platform-specific components. This approach introduces abstract components to the platform-independent architecture and refines the se with components specific to the target platform prior to code generation. Consequently, a single logical software architecture model can be reused with multiple target platforms, which increases architecture maturity and reduces the maintenance effort of multiple similar software architectures.