A type-centric framework for specifying heterogeneous, large-scale, component-oriented, architectures

Maintaining integrity and consistency, and effecting conformance in architectures of large-scale systems require specification and enforcement of many different forms of structural constraints. While type systems have proved effective for enforcing structural constraints in programs and data structures, most architectural modeling frameworks include only weak notions of typing or rely on first order logic constraint languages that have steep learning curves associated with them and that become unwieldy when scaling to large systems.We present the Cadena Architecture Language with Meta-modeling (CALM) — that uses multi-level type systems to specify and enforce a variety of architectural constraints relevant to the development of large-scale component-based systems. Cadena is a robust and extensible tool that has been used to specify a number of industrial strength component models and applied in multiple industrial research projects on model-driven development and software product lines.