Dynamic Design and Evaluation of Software Architecture in Critical Systems Development

Hansen, K.M. and Wells, L.

The software architecture of a computing system is an abstracted structure of the system in terms of elements and relationships. Such structures may be viewed from a number of viewpoints including static/module, dynamic/execution, and deployment viewpoints. Software architecture fundamentally influences systems from all of these viewpoints and designing and implementing proper software architectures is thus critical in many problem domain areas, including the ones that pertain to safety-critical systems. With respect to safety-critical systems, a particular problem with focusing on software architecture is that there may be a large abstraction gap between an architectural description and an executing system or a formal model thereof thus potentially leading to inconsistencies between models and implementation. Addressing this problem, this paper presents tools and techniques for specifying executable software architectures and for validating these with formal models such as statecharts and Petri nets.

Cite as: Hansen, K.M. and Wells, L. (2006). Dynamic Design and Evaluation of Software Architecture in Critical Systems Development. In Proc. Eleventh Australian Workshop on Safety-Related Programmable Systems (SCS 2006), Melbourne, Australia. CRPIT, 69. Cant, T., Ed. ACS. 35-44.

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