Almost all of electric utility companies are planning to improve their management automation system, in order to meet the changing requirements of new liberalized energy market and to benefit from the innovations in information and communication technology (ICT or IT). Architectural design of the utility management automation (UMA) systems for their IT-enabling requires proper selection of ...

This paper discusses the understanding of quality attributes and their application to the design of a software architecture. We present an approach to characterizing quality attributes and capturing architectural patterns that are used to achieve these attributes. For each pattern, it is important not only how the pattern achieves a quality attribute goal but also what impact the pattern has on...

When designing software architectures, an architect relies on a set of pre-defined styles commonly named architectural patterns. While architectural patterns embody high level design decisions, an architectural tactic is a design strategy that addresses a particular quality attribute. Tactics; in fact, serve as the meeting point between the quality attributes and the software architecture. To g...

A number of mature toolkits and language workbenches for DSL-based design have been proposed, making DSL-based design attractive for many projects. These toolkits preselect many architectural decision options. However, in many cases it would be beneficial for DSL-based design to decide for the DSL’s architecture later on in a DSL project, once the requirements and the domain have been sufficien...

Research on ontology is becoming increasingly widespread in the computer science community, and its importance is being recognized in a multiplicity of research fields and application areas, including knowledge engineering, database design and integration, information retrieval and extraction. We shall use the generic term “information systems”, in its broadest sense, to collectively refer to t...