REPRESENTATION AND REASONING MODELS FOR C3 ARCHITECTURE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGE
Abdelkrim Amirat, Mourad Oussalah · 2008
Laboratoire LINA CNRS UMR 6241, Universite de Nante s 2, Rue de la Houssiniere, BP 92208, 44322 Nantes Cedex 03, France {abdelkrim.amirat, mourad.oussalah}@Univ-Nantes.fr Keywords: Model, Representation, Hierarchy, Co nnector, Architecture. Abstract: Component-based development is a pr oven approach to manage the complexity of software and its need for customization. At an architectural level, one descr ibes the principal system components and their path ways of interaction. So, Architecture is considered to be the driving aspect of the development process; i t allows specifying which aspects and models in each level n eeded according to the software architecture design . Early Architecture description languages (ADLs), ne arly exclusive, focus on structural abstraction hie rarchy ignoring behavioural description hierarchy, concept ual hierarchy, and metamodeling hierarchy. In this paper we focus on those four hierarchies which represent views to appropriately reason about software architectures described using our C3 metamodel whic h is a minimal and complete architecture descriptio n language. In this paper we provide a set of mechani sms to deal with different levels of each hierarchy , also we introduce our proper structural definition for c onnectors elements deployed in C3 Architectures.