DOMAIN ANALYSIS AND DESIGN OF GENERIC ARCHITECTURES : METHODS AND CASE STUDY

Abstract

In many software domains, the development of modern information systems has become increasingly complex and fraught with risks. There has been a trend away from the approach of developing "one-of­ a-kind" systems to developing a family of systems based on some generic architecture. In this latter "system family" approach, a generic architecture is used as the basis for developing specific instances of the system family. The generic architecture is augmented or refined to obtain specific systems, where each of these specific systems can satisfy a different set of requirements. In attempting to apply the system family approach to the facilities reservation domain. we discovered a number of problems during domain analysis as well as during the design and customisation of generic software architectures. One problem was related to modelling variations in software requirements for a system family. Requirements may appear in various, usually not arbitrary, combinations in family members and we needed methods for precise modelling variations and valid configurations of requirements. Another problem was how to effectively use domain models to derive the structure of a generic architecture and then customise it for a specific system. In the sources available to us, we could not find general solutions to these problems nor case studies detailed enough to provide specific guidelines. In this thesis, we describe a novel domain modelling method and frame-based techniques that we applied to overcome the above-mentioned problems. The overall objective of our work is to create formal links between rcquiremcnt8 for system families and the process of customising a generic architecture in order to meet requirements of a specific software system. Ideally. a system engineer would define requirements for a specific system (based on the domain model) and an automated engineering environment would actively guide him/her in obtaining the architecture and code for the specific system. In this thesis, we developed techniques that will bring us closer to achieving this objective.