On the equivalence between reference architectures and metamodels

Reference Architectures (RA) are a special class of software architectures which comprises a family of concrete architectures. On the other hand, Model-Driven Development (MDD) has been largely adopted in software development. In MDD, a metamodel is usually used to "derive" concrete models. Analogously, RA are used to "derive" concrete architectures. In this direction, we claim that there exist an equivalence between metamodels and RA in a conceptual level. To con rm this, we collected a small set of criteria available in literature and compared metamodels and RA characteristics. We concluded that these concepts are quite equivalent. And, as a corollary, all of the techniques, frameworks, methods, and processes related to MDD could be extended and used in architecture derivations based on RA. Thus, the main contribution of this paper is presenting evidences that support this hypothesis. The theoretical and practical inferences from this discovery indicates new research directions for software architecture domain.