On the Role of Architectural Style in Model Driven Development

Object Management Group’s Model-Driven Architecture (MDA) can be considered as one of the achievements resulting from ever-increasing importance of software architecture. However, based on case studies on using the ideas of MDA both with UML and in a formal setting, some notions that have been conventionally associated with architecture-oriented development have no clear role in the model. In particular, we are referring to architectural styles, which can be seen as recurring architectures of various systems, especially when designing product families. In this paper, we analyze architectural styles in the context of MDA, propose a modification to the model that would allow encapsulation of architectural properties in it, and demonstrate the usage of the approach with two examples, where interaction and distribution are the essential characteristics of the used architecture.