On the Necessity of an Architecture Framework for On- The-Fly Computing

In our research, we investigate design processes of future software systems. Our vision is that software services are provided in a world-wide distributed market and are composed automatically in order to fulfil individual user requests on-thefly. This On-The-Fly Computing (OTF) software provision can be defined and then applied in different domains taking into account constraints of those domains. In practice, such constraints are interrelated and distributed among business models, software applications, and technical infrastructures. Thus, an efficient, holistic, and consistent realization of the OTF paradigm in different domains demands a well-defined architecture that reveals the main building blocks of OTF. In this paper, we discuss the suitability of existing architecture frameworks and derive the requirements for an architecture framework to realize OTF in different domains. The architecture framework considers dependencies among design constraints in final software. This knowledge helps architects to systematically apply the principles of OTF computing in their own domains in practice.