A Formal Approach to Architectural Descriptions - Refining the ISO Standard 42010

Architectural descriptions representing and modeling the architecture of a system or parts thereof are typically used in the engineering disciplines to plan, develop, maintain, and manage complex systems. Primarily originating from construction engineering, the means of architecting and architectural descriptions have been successfully transferred to related disciplines like software engineering. While a rich and formal theory on conceptual modeling exists as well as frameworks on how to approach architectural descriptions, e.g. the ISO standard 42010, only few attempts have yet been made to integrate the prescriptions and guidelines from these sources into a formal architectural description framework. In this paper, we establish such a framework against the background provided by the ISO standard 42010 by formally defining the terms concern, view, viewpoint, and architectural description. Further, an outlook discusses potential application areas of the framework.