Arcadia Papers: ABSTRACT
"Formal Modeling of Software Architectures at Multiple Levels of Abstraction",
by Nenad Medvidovic, Richard N. Taylor, and E. James Whitehead, Jr. in
Proceedings of the
California Software Symposium 1996,
pages 28-40, Los Angeles, CA, April 17, 1996.
Abstract
Software architectures are multi-dimensional entities that
can be fully understood only when viewed and analyzed at
four different levels of abstraction: (1) internal functionality
of a component, (2) the interface(s) exported by the
component to the rest of the system, (3) interconnection of
architectural elements in an architecture, and (4) rules of the
architectural style. This paper presents the characteristics of
each of the four levels of architectural abstraction, outlines
the kinds of analyses that need to be performed at each
level, and discusses the kinds of formal notations that are
suitable at each level. We use the pipe-and-filter and Chiron-
2 (C2) architectural styles as illustrations. In particular, we
present formal models of C2 at the last three levels of
abstraction as a first step in enabling a C2 design
environment to perform the necessary analyses of
architectures. We discuss the benefits of the formal
definitions and our experience to date.
The Arcadia Project
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Last modified: Tue May 23 13:40:23 1995