Traceable and information-preserving composition of structural models

A structural view is a base view for describing software architectures. A structural view typically comprises several structural models that highlight particular aspects of the software. From our experience, managing the dependencies between structural models is a challenging, yet crucial task for maintaining consistency of an architectural description. In this paper, we focus on the composition of structural models and managing dependencies between models in such a composition. We formally define three basic relations between structural models and a composition operator that enables integration of several structural models based on these relations. We elaborate on several information preserving properties of the composition operator, including traceability, consistency, and completeness. The relations and composition operator have been integrated in the xADL language and the AchStudio tool. We use excerpts of a distributed video-on-demand system designed with the tool as an illustrative case.