Dias Valle Pedro Henrique, Garcés Lina, Volpato Tiago, Martínez-Fernández Silverio, Nakagawa Elisa Yumi
University of São Paulo (USP), São Carlos, Brazil.
Federal University of Itajubá (UNIFEI), Itajubá, Brazil.
PeerJ Comput Sci. 2021 Mar 9;7:e392. doi: 10.7717/peerj-cs.392. eCollection 2021.
Due to the increasing size and complexity of many current software systems, the architectural design of these systems has become a considerately complicated task. In this scenario, reference architectures have already proven to be very relevant to support the architectural design of systems in diverse critical application domains, such as health, avionics, transportation, and the automotive sector. However, these architectures are described in many different approaches, such as using textual description, informal models, and even modeling languages as UML. Hence, practitioners are faced with a difficult decision of the better approaches to describing reference architectures. The main contribution of this work is to depict a detailed panorama containing the state of the art (from the literature) and state of the practice (based on existing reference architectures) of approaches for describing reference architectures. For this, we firstly examined the existing approaches (e.g., processes, methods, models, and modeling languages) and compared them concerning completeness and applicability. We also examined four well-known, successful reference architectures (AUTOSAR, ARC-IT, IIRA, and AXMEDIS) in view of the approaches used to describe them. As a result, there exists a misalignment between the state of the art and state of the practice, requiring an engagement of the software architecture community, through research collaboration of academia and industry, to propose more suitable means to describe reference architectures and, as a consequence, promoting the sustainability of these architectures.
由于当前许多软件系统的规模和复杂性不断增加，这些系统的架构设计已成为一项相当复杂的任务。在这种情况下，参考架构已被证明与支持健康、航空电子、交通和汽车等不同关键应用领域的系统架构设计密切相关。然而，这些架构有多种不同的描述方式，例如使用文本描述、非正式模型，甚至像UML这样的建模语言。因此，从业者面临着选择哪种更好的方式来描述参考架构的艰难抉择。这项工作的主要贡献是描绘一幅详细的全景图，涵盖描述参考架构的方法的现有技术水平（来自文献）和实践现状（基于现有参考架构）。为此，我们首先研究了现有的方法（如流程、方法、模型和建模语言），并在完整性和适用性方面对它们进行了比较。我们还从用于描述它们的方法的角度研究了四个著名的成功参考架构（AUTOSAR、ARC-IT、IIRA和AXMEDIS）。结果表明，现有技术水平与实践现状之间存在脱节，需要软件架构界通过学术界和工业界的研究合作，提出更合适的方法来描述参考架构，从而促进这些架构的可持续性。
