An Approach for Multi-Dimensional Separation Concerns at Architecture Level

Traditional architecture design approaches suffer from the crosscutting features and behaviors, which scattered and tangled in the components and connectors, result in the final architecture solutions uneasy to evolve and reuse. In this paper, we propose an approach for multi-dimensional separating crosscutting concerns at architecture level, including: (1) an architectural meta concern space can be reused for deriving more concrete system-specific concerns; (2)a "1+X" model can be used for representing crosscutting and non-crosscutting architectural concerns and relationships; (3) a process is used to address those in a multi-dimensional way. This provides a rigorous analysis of architecture-level concerns as well as important insights into various architecture design solutions. Besides, this makes it possible to, not only eliminate the crosscutting features and behaviors at early architecture design stage, but also encapsulate the crosscutting concerns with concepts and techniques related to aspect in later architecture design activities.