Analyzing architectural styles

The backbone of most software architectures and component integration frameworks is one or more architectural styles that provide a domain-specific design vocabulary and a set of constraints on how that vocabulary is used. Today’s architectural styles are increasingly complex, involving rich vocabularies and numerous constraints. Hence, designing a sound and appropriate style becomes an intellectually challenging activity. Unfortunately, although there are numerous tools to help in the analysis of architectures for individual systems, relatively less work has been done on tools to help in the design of architectural styles. In this paper we address this gap by showing how to map an architectural style, expressed formally in an architectural description language, into a relational model that can then be checked for properties, such as whether a style is consistent, whether a style satisfies some predicates over its architectural structure, and whether two styles are compatible for composition.