In: IEICE Trans. on Information Systems, Vol. E83-D, No. 4, pages 701-712. 2000.
Abstract: The quality of an architectural design of a software system has a great influence on achieving non-functional requirements of the system, so formal evaluation and validation techniques for designed architectures are necessary in the early phase of the development process. The paper presents a technique for describing software architectures formally based on colored Petri nets (CPNs) and a technique for reusing architectural constituents. Architectural descriptions are are essentially written with a CPN language, so that the evaluation and analysis of the architectural descriptions can be made in the architectural design phase. Reusable architectural parts are extracted from standard architecture styles and architectural patterns so that a designer can construct an architecture by only retrieving the parts and combine them. A language for describing the combination of architectural parts has been designed. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is illustrated by a blackboard architecture that can be composed of reusable parts and can be simulated on a CPN tool (Design/CPN).
Keywords: Design/CPN, colored Petri nets, formal specification, software architecture.