Style-based software architectural compositions as domain-specific models

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.

This paper provides an introduction to the field of software engineering requires facility in architectural software design. The goal is to demonstrate the current state of the discipline and examine the ways in which architectural design can impact soft-ware design. Software architecture is used to describe a high level design methodology of large software systems. It provides the overall structure of a system in an abstract and structured fashion. A smart architectural demonstration holds the key to the effectiveness of a software architecture description and usage. This paper focuses on criterion to select appropriate architecture style for software system. It also gives overview of definition, goals and requirements of software architecture with various architecture styles, their benefits and applications. The authors have also described the requirements and goals of robotic software architecture. The proposal for layered robotic software architecture for a distributed system is also presented.

Metric-based Evaluation of Implemented Software Architectures

The concept of Software Architecture (SA) provides a new way for the transition from the construct and requirement to implementation. Software architecture style is a classification of SA. Different style has different system characteristic. Through the research of software architecture style, we can direct the software development well using SA. Formalizing software architecture style made the communication more precise and convenient at the level of SA. Formalizing software architecture style will be beneficial to formal verification and comparison of different style. This paper proposes the service oriented software architecture style, formalizes the new service oriented SA style using formal specification notation Z, gives the definition of match and composition of service component, analyses the replacement of SA style and proves four theorems of replacement.

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).

The aspect-oriented software architectural weaving mechanism, to integrate aspectual components that encapsulate crosscutting behaviors and features into components and connectors constituting software architecture (SA), contributes to analyze and verify overall behaviors and quality attributes of SA. This paper proposes a new kind of weaving process and rules, which offer the measure to transform the unwoven SA model into the woven SA model. The unwoven SA model is described in a special aspect-oriented architecture description language, called AC2-ADL, and specifies the locations, times and constrains of injection. Then a woven SA model only containing components and connectors is acquired after weaving, and easier to analyze and verify.

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.

With the growing use of UML diagrams for software architecture description and the importance of non-functional requirements evaluation at software architecture level, filling the scientific gap between architect and requirement analyst is considered to be significant. Software architects are not usually familiar with non-functional requirement analysis and are not able to analyze such requirements easily. On the other hand, non-functional requirements cannot be evaluated directly by UML diagrams. Therefore, the architect should annotate additional information of the nonfunctional requirements to software architecture description and then an executable model can be produced. These executable models can be petri nets, queuing networks, stochastic process algebra and etc. One kind of the UML diagrams that can be used to describe software architecture is component diagram. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that enables an architect to transform a component diagram into an executable model based on different extensions of petri nets. Moreover, we show how to use this petri net model for performance evaluation and simulation and the implications of this transformation are described completely. Finally, to represent the usage of our proposed algorithm, we consider a case study as an example.

Software architecture is widely recognized as one of the most fundamental concepts in software engineering, because of the fact, that today’s software systems are assembled from components with different characteristics: for example heterogenous, legacy or distributed systems. At the software architecture level, designers combine subsystems into complete systems using different techniques, e.g. “Architecture Description Languages” (ADLs). There exists a number of ADLs, each of which is specialized for one or more architectural styles. They are designed by different research groups with different goals in mind corresponding to their mental model on how software architecture can be expressed in the most efficient and elegant way. As a result, ADLs are not compatible with each other, so that it is difficult to present a homogeneous view of the software architecture of a system assembled from different components. This paper presents an approach how architectural styles can be combined using a concept of ADL-interchange.KeywordsSoftware ArchitectureDescription LanguageArchitectural StyleService LayerAbstract State MachineThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Recently, more attention is paid to the researches and practices on how to use software architecture in software maintenance and evolution to reduce their complexity and cost. The key in such architecture-based maintenance and evolution is to recover software architecture from existing systems. Almost all studies on architecture recovery focus on analyzing the source code and other documents. Such recovered software architecture can hardly capture runtime states and behaviors of the system. At the same time, current work pays little attention on how to change the system directly via manipulating the recovered software architecture. This paper presents a novel approach to recovering software architecture from component based systems at runtime and changing the runtime systems via manipulating the recovered software architecture. Containing much more details than the designed software architecture, the recovered software architecture can accurately and thoroughly describe the actual states and behaviors of the runtime system. It can be described formally with the extension of traditional architecture description language, which enables the recovered software architecture to absorb the semantics embedded in the designed software architecture. The recovered software architecture can be represented as multiple views so as to help different users to control the complexity from different concerns. Based on the reflective ability of the component framework, the recovered software architecture is up-to-date at any time and changes made on it will immediately lead to the corresponding changes in the runtime system. The approach presented in this paper is demonstrated on PKUAS, a reflective J2EE (Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition) application server, and the performance is also evaluated.

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.

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.

Software performance based on performance models can be applied at early phases of the software development cycle to characterize the quantitative behavior of software systems. We propose an approach based on queueing networks models for performance prediction of software systems at the software architecture level, specified by UML. Starting from annotated UML Use Case, Activity and Deployment diagrams we derive a performance models based on multichain and multiclass Queueing Networks (QN). The UML model is annotated according to the UML Profile for Schedulability, Performance and Time Specification. The proposed algorithm translates the annotated UML specification into QN performance models, which can then be analyzed using standard solution techniques. Performance results are reported back at the software architecture level in the UML diagrams. As our approach can be fully automated and uses standard UML annotations, it can be integrated with other performance modeling approaches. Specifically, we discuss how this QN-based approach can be integrated with an existing simulation-based performance modeling tool.

A key challenge of component-based software engineering is to preserve extra-functional properties such as security when composing the software architecture from individual components. Previous work in this area does not consider specific characteristics of cyber-physical systems like asynchronous message passing, real-time behavior, or so-called feedback composition with two-way communication. Thereby, a composition of secure components might lead to insecure architectures with undetected information leaks. In this paper, we address the preservation of information flow security on composition of cyber-physical systems, taking the above characteristics into account. We refine security policies during the architectural decomposition, and outline a compositional verification approach that checks the security of individual components against their refined policies. On composition of secure components, our approach preserves security and thereby enables the design of secure software architectures. We give a proof of concept using a component-based software architecture of a cyber-manufacturing system.