Expressiveness in architecture description languages

This paper explores some issues in the expressiveness of Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) based on our work architecting large, software-intensive systems for command and control and related domains. We briefly outline and motivate several cases where current ADLs lack architecturally useful forms of expression and suggest approaches to addressing some of these cases. 1 Architectural Description Architects don’t make architectures, they make representations of architectures. Architectural description ‐ the means to record architectural information in a form such that it may be used (communicated, analyzed, manipulated) and re-used ‐ is central to the emerging practice of software systems architecture. Interest in architectural description has taken various forms. One active area of current research is architecture description languages (ADLs) as witnessed by:

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