Software Architecture For Building Research Articles

Entropy as a Measure of Consistency in Software Architecture

In building software architectures, the relations between elements in different diagrams are often overlooked. The first stage of building IT systems is the use of ontology terminology, not software terminology, in the requirements engineering process. Then, when constructing software architecture, IT architects more or less consciously however introduce elements that represent the same classifier on different diagrams with similar names. These connections are called consistency rules and are usually not attached in any way in a modeling tool, and only a significant number of them in the models increase the quality of the software architecture. It is mathematically proved that the application of consistency rules increases the information content of software architecture. Authors show that increasing readability and ordering of software architecture by means of consistency rules have their mathematical rationale. In this article, we found proof of decreasing Shannon entropy while applying consistency rules in the construction of software architecture of IT systems. Therefore, it has been shown that marking selected elements in different diagrams with these same names is, therefore, an implicit way to increase the information content of software architecture while simultaneously improving its orderliness and readability. Moreover, this increase in the quality of the software architecture can be measured by entropy, which allows for checking whether the number of consistency rules is sufficient to compare different architectures, even of different sizes, thanks to entropy normalization, and checking during the development of the software architecture, what is the improvement in its orderliness and readability.

A review and future directions of SOA-based software architecture modeling approaches for System of Systems

Software architecture is a software system’s earliest set of design decisions that are critical for the quality of the system desired by the stakeholders. The architecture makes it easier to reason about and manage change during different phases of complex software life cycle. The modeling of software architecture for System of Systems (SoS) is a challenging task because of a system’s complexity arising from an integration of heterogeneous, distributed, managerially and operationally independent systems collaborating to achieve global missions. SoS is essentially dynamic and evolutionary by design requiring suitable architectural patterns to deal with runtime volatility. Service-oriented architecture offers several architectural features to these complex systems; these include, interoperability, loose coupling, abstraction and the provision of dynamic services based on standard interfaces and protocols. There is some research work available that provides critical analysis of current software architecture modeling approaches for SoS. However, none of them outlines the important characteristics of SoS or provides detailed analysis of current service-oriented architecture modeling approaches to model those characteristics. This article addresses this research gap and provides a taxonomy of software architecture modeling approaches, comparing and contrasting them using criteria critical for realization of SoS. Additionally, research gaps are identified, and future directions are outlined for building software architecture for SoS to model and reason about architecture quality in a more efficient way in service-oriented paradigm.

Software for energy efficient control system over process parameters of MIMO objects on a set of functioning states

Theoretical and practical aspects of building software architecture for energy efficient control of MIMO systems on a set of functioning states are considered. The control systems are classified depending on the nature of changes in the functioning state variable and the possibility of its identification on the control interval. The specifics of software implementation for the systems of various classes are shown. The software is structured with the allocation of functional subsystems and modules. The generalized software architecture for energy efficient control systems on a set of functioning states is proposed.

Building Software Component Architecture Directly from User Requirements

Building software architectures from a set of requirements has been an area of research where programmers, architects and software engineers spend a lot of time using their expertise in resolving peculiar problems of mapping requirements to architectures. Some of these problems are directly associated with the ambiguity, incompleteness and inconsistency of requirements which draw a wide gap between the informal and formal specification of these requirements. The main objective here is to reconcile the mismatch in-between these domains by providing a systematic mapping technique. This paper presents a tool from which requirements are read from user in natural language or file and generated into words whereby the user makes some selections and maps the selected words directly to components architecture. Based on the design of this tool, human heuristic is used in the selection of the words. Unlike components, connectors are set as static. Partial architecture of requirements is drawn incrementally until complete system architecture is constructed

A quantitative and knowledge-based approach to choosing security architectural tactics

This paper presents a quantitative approach to choosing security architectural tactics using architectural tactic knowledge base. An architectural tactic is an architectural design building block pertaining to a software quality. The tactic knowledge base is a tactic repository composing of architectural tactic specifications defined in role based metamodelling language (RBML) and their relationships expressed in a feature model. In this paper, a cost of an architectural tactic is estimated by using the use case points method, and a level of tactic contribution for non–functional requirements (NFRs) is predicted by the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and sensitivity analysis. Then, the proposed approach suggests the best possible fit which is likely to satisfy NFRs. We applied the approach to choosing security architectural tactics for building software architecture of an online trading system.

Modeling Flight Software from Architectural Design Patterns

his paper discusses how Software design patterns are applicable to Flight Software (FSW) domain. The application of design patterns is particularly important in this domain to improve the quality of software and reduce the flight software anomalies which lead to major losses. Generic architectural design patterns for real-time software components are customized to suit the flight software domain. This is illustrated using the Student Nitric Oxide Explorer (SNOE), which is a real world case study from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). The customized design patterns are validated and made executable templates which help an engineer when building software architectures.

Software architecture for building

Test system developers can benefit greatly from a software architecture that allows for easy interchangeability of instruments in those systems. Using open industry standard software architectures such as Virtual Instrument Software Architecture (VISA), and Interchangeable Virtual Instruments (IVI), developers are able to create systems with interchangeable test instrumentation. This paper describes the VISA and IVI software standards and demonstrates how their use within a broader software architecture, which includes standard development environments and flexible test executive software, facilitates the creation of interchangeable test systems.