A family of languages for architecture constraint specification

During software development, architecture decisions should be documented so that quality attributes guaranteed by these decisions and required in the software specification could be persisted. An important part of these architectural decisions is often formalized using constraint languages which differ from one stage to another in the development process. In this paper, we present a family of architectural constraint languages, called ACL. Each member of this family, called a profile, can be used to formalize architectural decisions at a given stage of the development process. An ACL profile is composed of a core constraint language, which is shared with the other profiles, and a MOF architecture metamodel. In addition to this family of languages, this paper introduces a transformation-based interpretation method of profiles and its associated tool. (C) 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.