Measuring Complexity of System / Software Architecture Using Higraph-Based Model

The exponential growing effort, cost and time investment of complex systems in modeling phase emphasize the need for a methodology, a framework and a environment to handle the system model complexity. For that, it is necessary to be able to measure the system model complexity. This paper highlights the requirements a model needs to fulfill to match human user expectations. It suggests a hierarchical graphbased formalism for modeling complex systems and presents transformations to handle the underlying complexity. Finally, a way to measure complexity based on Shannon theory of information is proposed and applied to an example.