Deriving architectural descriptions from goal-oriented requirements
Damien Vanderveken · 2004
The problem of building an architecture that satisfies the software requirements is obviously central to software engineering. By and large such building is an ad hoc, largely informal, and unsystematic process to date. One strand of research to address this challenge is based on architecture derivation from goaloriented requirements models. This paper builds on previous efforts in this direction and proposes a more formal approach to architectural derivation. The structural and behavioral parts of a formal dataflow architecture are derived first by use of transformation rules applied to the requirements model. The dataflow architecture is then refined by use of formal refinement patterns applied to components and connectors. Each refinement pattern is associated with a specific class of non-functional goal whose instances are found in the requirements model. The source and target languages are the KAOS requirements language and Wright architecture description language, respectively. A power plant supervision system is used as a case study to illustrate the main steps of the derivation.