Formalizing Architectural Patterns with the Goal-oriented Requirement Language

Many pattern descriptions put their emphasis on the solution to a problem rather than on often conflicting forces and how patterns balance such forces. This work uses the Goal-oriented Requirement Language (GRL) to formalize the forces of architectural patterns in a way that enables rigorous trade-off analysis while allowing the pattern user to determine the applicability of a pattern to the problem in a given context. The formalization of forces does not replace other pattern descriptions but rather complements them and relies on them to provide descriptions of the problem and solution. This work presents a description of the forces applicable in the context of architectural design, introduces how to represent patterns and forces with GRL, and then formalizes a subset of a recently published architectural pattern language.