Architectural Connectors for Sequence Diagrams

The notion of architectural connector was developed by Allen and Garland as an important concept for the design of software architectures. In this paper, based on previous work introducing a generic approach for the definition of component-based concepts, we study how architectural connectors and components can be defined for UML2 sequence diagrams as a first step for applying this approach to full UML. A case-study of a small lift system is used to illustrate these ideas.