Describing Software-Intensive Process Architectures Using a UML-Based ADL

Many Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) have been proposed in the software architecture community, with several competing notations, each of them bringing its own body of specification languages and analysis techniques. The aim of all is to reduce the costs of error detection and repair while providing adequate abstractions for modelling large software-intensive systems and establishing properties of interest. However, there now exists a large consensus to standardise on notations and methods for software analysis and design as standardisation provides an economy of scale that results in various and better tools, better interoperability between tools, more available developers skilled in using the standard notation, and lower training costs. Therefore software-intensive process architectures can be relevantly described using a standard-compliant design notation. Among such notations, the UML modelling language that on one side makes use of visual notations and on the other side, is an emerging standard software design language and a starting point for bringing architectural modelling into industrial use. This paper presents an architecture-centred UML-based notation to describe software process architectures. The architectural concepts have already been formally defined in an Architecture Description textual Language. The notation is illustrated by a business-to-business process application. The main contribution of this work is to show that UML with its large and extensible set of predefined constructs imposes itself as a relevant candidate to be extended with the necessary architectural concepts and customisation to model softwareintensive processes. The work presented is being developed and validated within the framework of the ArchWare1 IST 5 ongoing European project. 1 ArchWare Consortium : CPR – Consorzio Pisa Ricerche (Italy), InterUnec/Listic – Université de Savoie (France), Victoria University of Manchester (UK), ENGINEERING – Ingegneria Informatica S.p.A. (Italy), INRIA – Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (France), THESAME – Mecatronique et Management (France), University Court of the University of St. Andrews (UK).