Architecture Diagrams: A Graphical Language for Architecture Style Specification

TL;DR

This paper introduces a graphical notation called architecture diagrams for specifying architecture styles, providing semantics, consistency conditions, and algorithms for conformance checking, thereby improving clarity and expressiveness in architectural design.

Contribution

It proposes a new graphical language for architecture style specification, including simple and interval diagrams, with formal semantics, consistency criteria, and efficient conformance algorithms.

Findings

Defined semantics for architecture diagrams

Provided polynomial-time conformance checking algorithm

Illustrated applications with multiple examples

Abstract

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.