Database-centric architecture

About: Database-centric architecture is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1799 publications have been published within this topic receiving 48836 citations.

Software Architectures for Designing Virtual Reality Applications

Abstract: Software architectures are particularly useful when designing complex systems. Apart from facilitating the design, development and evolution processes, software architectures help developers who are new in the domain to understand the design issues involved, reducing the learning effort. In this work we present a software architecture for virtual reality systems. This architecture applies patterns common in other interactive systems, such as the Model-View- Controller, and also identifies new patterns proper of the VR domain, such as the scene graph. In addition, in the proposed architecture we have identified the variability points needed for adapting and evolving such VR systems.

A Model of Service-Oriented Architectures

Abstract: Architectural styles and patterns play an important role in software engineering. Over the last years, a new style based on the notion of services emerged, which we call the service-oriented architecture style. However, this style is usually only stated informally, which may cause inherent problems such as ambiguity, wrong conclusions, and the difficulty of checking the conformance of a system to the style. We address these problems by providing a formal, denotational semantics of the service-oriented architecture style and two variants thereof: the layered architecture style and the strict architecture style. Loosely speaking, in our model of the service-oriented architecture style, services are a means of communication. Components exchange services between each other via ports. The layered architecture variant imposes a well-foundedness constraint on the communication structure, while the strict variant imposes an antitransitivity constraint. We analyze the notions of syntactic and semantic dependencies for service-oriented architectures and investigate their relationship. Moreover, the expected informal properties of the styles are formulated as theorems. Finally, we present a method for soundly analyzing instances of the style. Our rigorous approach enables building higher-quality architectures, for which properties can be mathematically stated and proven, by enforcing formal discipline on the inter-component scale.

Exploring ontologies to support the establishment of reference architectures: An example on software testing

Abstract: Software architectures have played a significant role in determining the success of software systems. In particular, reference architectures have emerged, achieving well-recognized understanding in a specific domain, promoting reuse of design expertise and facilitating the development of systems. In another perspective, ontologies have been widely investigated aiming at representing, communicating and reusing knowledge. In spite of their relevance on directly dealing with domain knowledge, reference architectures and ontologies have been separately treated. In this paper we investigate the impact in using ontologies to the establishment of reference architectures. We illustrate our idea using an ontology of software testing to build a reference architecture for the testing domain. Preliminary results indicate that ontologies are an important and viable mechanism aiming at building reference architectures.

A knowledge-based system for change impact analysis on software architecture

Abstract: This paper deals with the change impact analysis for software architectures evolution. Some approaches have been proposed for integrating the evolution issue at the architectural level. However, none of these studies the impact assessment between the software architecture and its related source code. To deal with that, we propose a model, called ASCM (Architectural Software Components Model), on which we define our change propagation process. Our model describes the common elements defined in an architecture description, independently of architecture description languages (ADLs). The change propagation process is based on a knowledge-based system, in which the model instances are stored. When a modification is applied on these, propagation rules are fired to simulate the impact on software architecture and on its source code. This is done using a platform developed on the top of Eclipse Environment.

An integrated architecture for dependable embedded systems

Abstract: Summary form only given. A federated architecture is characterized in that every major function of an embedded system is allocated to a dedicated hardware unit. In a distributed control system this implies that adding a new function is tantamount to adding a new node. This has led to a order to achieve some functional coordination. Adding fault-tolerance to a federated architecture, e.g., by the provision of triple modular redundancy (TMR) leads to a further significant increase in the number of nodes and networks. The major advantages of a dedicated architecture are the physical encapsulation of the nearly autonomous subsystems, their outstanding fault containment and their clear-cut complexity management (independent development) in case the subsystems are nearly autonomous. An integrated distributed architecture for mixed-criticality applications must be based on a core design that supports the safety requirements of the highest considered criticality class. This is of particular importance in safety-critical applications, where the physical structure of the integrated system is determined to a significant extent by the independence requirement of fault-containment regions. The central part of an integrated distributed architecture for time-critical systems must provide the following core services: deterministic and timely transport of messages; fault tolerant clock synchronization; strong fault isolation with respect to arbitrary node failures; and consistent diagnosis of failing nodes. Any architecture that provides these core services can be used as a base architecture for an integrated distributed embedded system architecture. An example of such an integrated architecture is the time-triggered architecture (TTA). In this contribution we describe the structure and the services of the TTA that has been developed during the last twenty years and is deployed in a number of safety-critical applications in the transport sector.