Using Model Transformation Techniques for the Superimposition of Architectural Styles

Software Architecture is a key artifact in the software development process, as it provides a bridge between the requirements of the system-to-be and its final design. Architectural description is therefore a critical step, which can be assisted by the use of Architectural Styles. Styles make it possible to reuse architectural knowledge by providing guidelines for its description, and by constraining the configuration and behavior of the target system. The architect must superimpose these constraints, but this could be an error-prone task unless some kind of automatic support is provided. Therefore, this paper presents a proposal that generates proto-architectures by superimposing architectural styles on the initial requirements’ operationalization, using model-to-model (M2M) transformation techniques. Our proposal includes a tool called MORPHEUS, which applies QVT as the transformation language; a real-world example is provided to explain how the superimposition process works, and how the QVT language is used to express these style-based transformations.