A Review on Software Architecture Styles with Layered Robotic Software Architecture

The application of AI technology in architectural software has brought various innovations and changes to the industry. By introducing convolutional neural networks and deep neural networks, architectural design software is expected to automatically identify and generate complex architectural images, optimize the design process, and provide intelligent design assistance. Through literature research, this paper aims to discuss the specific application of CNN and DNN in parametric design and the innovation brought by them, and analyzes the application of these technologies in architectural image recognition, generation, design optimization and other aspects. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive reference for researchers in related fields and promote the innovative application of AI technology in architectural design. The application of AI technology in architectural software has brought numerous innovations and changes to the industry. By introducing convolutional neural networks and deep neural networks, architectural design software is expected to automatically identify and generate complex architectural images, optimize the design process, and provide intelligent design assistance. Through literature research, this paper aims to discuss the specific application of CNN and DNN in parametric design and the innovation brought by them; it also analyzes the application of these technologies in architectural image recognition, generation, design optimization, and other aspects. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive reference for researchers in related fields and promote the innovative application of AI technology in architectural design.

Context. Software systems play a pervasive role in people's lives. Since ethics in software systems is hardly ever considered as a first-class entity, its support of, or hindrance to, values of users and society is usually neglected. Addressing ethics requires both to consider the context in which a software system is used, and the fact that ethical values (e.g., social, cultural and personal) are intrinsically ambiguous and subjective. Software architecture and architecture design decision making are the right levels of abstraction to both consider such a context, and support reasoning about such subjectivities. Goal. We aim to embed ethical aspects in software architecture design decision making. We have studied the state of the art in ethics for software engineering, to identify the ethical aspects influencing software architecture design. We will use the learned ethical aspects to (i) support architecture design decision making with respect to ethics through proposing methods, models, and techniques, and (ii) conduct empirical studies to evaluate them in industrial practice. Method. We will adopt a design science approach for our research which includes three phases: (i) problem understanding, (ii) solution design, and (iii) solution validation. Results. Based on our previous literature study, we build models (and techniques) embedding the ethical aspects to be used in architecture design decision making. Also, we will apply design science research to use and validate these models in a method assisting practitioners and architects to embed ethical aspects in software architecture design.

Metric-based Evaluation of Implemented Software Architectures

Software architecture is being widely used today to describe a very high-level design methodology of large software systems. Software architecture represents the overall structure of a system in an abstract, structured manner. A good architectural representation scheme holds the key to the effectiveness of a software architecture description and usage. In this work we look at architectural styles and architectural representation schemes. We propound the idea that the layered architectural model is a suitable candidate for a generalized architectural style and that it can cater to many different problem domains, other than the message-passing systems it has traditionally been used to model. We propose some rules by which the layered architectural style can be improved and modified in order to be able to model a wider problem domain. Then we evaluate different methods of architectural representations that have been used to model software architecture and analyze their strengths and shortcomings. We propose the use of a modified data flow diagram architecture representation scheme. This scheme is called AND-OR DFD method and is introduced and developed in this thesis. The main concept introduced here is a combination of components to form action groups to support multiple workflows and the relationships among them, without significant increase in the architectural complexity. Finally, we look at UML as a prospect for a generalized architecture description language and discuss its merits and demerits with examples.

Architectural styles represent composition patterns and constraints at the software architectural level and are targeted at families of systems with shared characteristics. While both style-specific and style-neutral modeling environments for software architectures exist, creation of such environments is expensive and frequently involves reinventing the wheel. This paper describes the rapid design of a style-neutral architectural modeling environment, ViSAC. ViSAC is based on Alfa, a framework for constructing style-based software architectures from architectural primitives, and is obtained by configuring Vanderbilt University's generic modeling environment (GME). Users can define their own styles in ViSAC and, in turn, use them to design software architectures. Moreover, ViSAC supports the hierarchical design of heterogeneous software architectures, i.e., using multiple styles. The rich user interface of GME and support for domain-specific semantics enable interactive design of well-formed styles and architectures.

Since the architecture of a software system constrains the quality attributes, the decisions taken during architectural design have a large impact on the resulting system. An architectural design method is presented that employs iterative evaluation and transformation of the software architecture in order to satisfy the quality requirements. Architecture evaluation is performed by using scenarios, simulation, mathematical modelling and experience-based reasoning. The architecture can be transformed by imposing an architectural style, imposing an architectural pattern, using a design pattern, converting a quality requirement to functionality and by distributing quality requirements. The method has evolved through its application in several industrial projects.

Welcome you to the Fifth Edition of the track Software Architecture: Theory, Technology, and Applications (SA-TTA 2017) as part of the 32th ACM/SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC).

This paper presents an initial model for evaluating and improving the availability of a software architecture design. The model is implemented as a reasoning framework in the ArchE architecture expert system developed jointly with the Software Engineering Institute. To ensure continuous availability many automotive electronic control units (ECUs) employ an external watchdog running on a separate CPU to monitor the software running on the ECU. If the ECU has a failure that causes interruption of its functionality, the watchdog can detect this and reset the ECU to restore correct operation. The availability model can automatically evaluate the effectiveness of a watchdog design in the software architecture and can propose improvements to achieve better availability before implementation decisions are made. The model enables a quantitative analysis of system availability that can better guide software architecture and dependability design decisions and potentially reduce implementation and testing effort.

This paper addresses the problem of supporting usability in the early stages of a product line architecture design. The product line used as an example is intended to support a variety of different products each with a radically different user interface. The development cycles for new products varies between three years and five years and usability is valued as an important quality attribute for each product in the line.Traditionally, usability is achieved in a product by designing according to specific usability guidelines, and then performing user tests. User interface design can be performed separately from software architecture design and prototyping, but user tests cannot be performed before detailed UI design and prototyping. If the user tests discover usability problems leading to required architectural changes, the company would not know about this until two years after the architecture design was complete. This problem was addressed by identifying a collection of 19 well known usability scenarios that require architectural support. In our example, the stakeholders for the product line prioritized three of these scenarios as key product-line scenarios for improving usability. For each of these three chosen product-line scenarios we developed an architectural responsibility pattern that provided support for the scenario. The responsibilities are expressed in terms of architectural requirements with implementation details and rationales. The responsibilities were embodied in a web based tool for the architects.The two architects for the product line developed a preliminary design and then reviewed their design against the responsibilities supporting the scenarios. The process of review took a day and the architects conservatively estimated that it saved them five weeks of effort later in the project.

A principal challenge for reducing the cost for designing complex systems-on-chip is to pursue more generic systems for a broad range of products. For this purpose, we explore three new architectural concepts for state-of-art video applications. First, we discuss a reusable scalable hardware architecture employing a hierarchical communication network fitting with the natural hierarchy of the application. In a case study, we show that MPEG streaming in DTV occurs at high level, while subsystems communicate at lower levels. The second concept is a software design that scales over a number of processors to enable reuse over a range of VLSI process technologies. We explore this via an H.264 decoder implementation scaling nearly linearly over up to eight processors by applying data partitioning. The third topic is resource-scalability, which is required to satisfy real-time constraints in a system with a high amount of shared resources. An example complaxity-scalable MPEG-2 coder scales the required cycle budget with a factor of three, in parallel with a smooth degradation of quality.

The success of any software system highly depends on the quality of architectural design. It has been observed that over time, the quality of software architectural design gets degraded. The software system with poor architecture design is difficult to understand and maintain. To improve the architecture of a software system, multiple design goals or objectives (often conflicting) need to be optimized simultaneously. To address such types of multi-objective optimization problems a variety of metaheuristic-oriented computational intelligence algorithms have been proposed. In existing approaches, harmony search (HS) algorithm has been demonstrated as an effective approach for numerous types of complex optimization problems. Despite the successful application of the HS algorithm on different non-software engineering optimization problems, it gained little attention in the direction of architecture reconstruction problem. In this study, we customize the original HS algorithm and propose a multi-objective harmony search algorithm for software architecture reconstruction (MoHS-SAR). To demonstrate the effectiveness of the MoHS-SAR, it has been tested on seven object-oriented software projects and compared with the existing related multi-objective evolutionary algorithms in terms of different software architecture quality metrics and metaheuristic performance criteria. The experimental results show that the MoHS-SAR performs better compared to the other related multi-objective evolutionary algorithms.

Software architecture design usually needs to be migrated to new architectural styles when new technologies and principles are adopted to enhance the qualities of the software system. The architectural migration is an evolution process, which the system is gradually and incrementally changed while the functionalities are still preserved. Planning the migration towards a new design is an important and challenging task. This paper presents an automated planning approach for architectural migration by applying AI planning and model checking technique. Our approach can automatically generate migration plans that can be used to find evolution path towards the new architecture designs. We have demonstrated our approach with a real-world system and found that it works effectively.

With the gradual development of enterprise information systems, the enterprises' knowledge is in the environment of heterogeneous sources. This paper analyzes the barriers to knowledge integration under such condition. It is pointed that software systems, as support of the knowledge integration, is the key enabler of knowledge integration, and that the software usability is the major issue of the system design. In addition, the relationship between the software usability (focused on knowledge aggregation, knowledge reuse and personalization) and the software architecture is discussed. Furthermore, recommendations for the software architecture design are provided to support effective knowledge integration.

: This final report documents the results of a five-year investigation of methods for achieving higher performance for knowledge based systems through the design of innovative software and hardware systems architectures. Volumes I summarizes the work performed and lessons learned, and serves as an annotated index to the set of over 50 project technical reports. Volumes II through IV contain the project technical reports.

The variation points in software architecture arise as a result of the availability of large number of filters and component libraries. An integration of different architectural styles is crucial and necessary in the development of large‐scale software application systems to handle the variation points. This article proposes a composite software architectural style for building application systems involving data streams, user interactivity, and dynamic mode. It uses a pattern within a pattern approach for combining the architectural styles. This approach provides flexibility to add or delete any filter or component at run time. In addition, the changes in the order of processing of the different filters or components can also be incorporated. The software architectural specification for any combination of input components and their order of processing is generated automatically. This specification acts as a baseline for the subsequent design and implementation phases of the application system. This model is generic and has been successfully validated for a prototype application system involving all the three modes of operation.