Managing Systems Complexity at Architectural Level

Today systems are getting bigger and more complex. In order to defend against overwhelming system complexity, we need to be able to understand and measure complexity and then, manage the issues that cause complexity. In this paper we discuss about the complexity challenge during the design of complex systems, methods and techniques for evaluation, measurement and reduction. The architecture model must be simple, maintainable and understandable. An appropriate level of abstraction in modeling helps to reduce the emerging complexity by focusing on the relevant properties and omitting irrelevant detail, thus leading to a simpler representation. Moreover engineering solutions such as model driven development may increase complexity due to the technologies used to create and manipulate models.