System architecture: the context for scenario-based model synthesis

• Authors: Sebastian Uchitel;Robert Chatley;Jeff Kramer;Jeff Magee
• Venue: Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGSOFT twelfth international symposium on Foundations of software engineering
• Year: 2004

Constructing rigorous models for analysing the behaviour of concurrent and distributed systems is a complex task. Our aim is to facilitate model construction. Scenarios provide simple, intuitive, example based descriptions of the behaviour of component instances in the context of a simplified architecture instance. The specific architecture instance is generally chosen to provide sufficient context to indicate the expected behaviour of particular instances of component types to be used in the real system. Existing synthesis techniques provide mechanisms for building behaviour models for these simplified and specific architectural settings. However, the behaviour models required are those for the full generality of the system architecture, and not the simplified architecture used for scenarios. In this paper we exploit architectural information in the context of behaviour model synthesis from scenarios. Software architecture descriptions give the necessary contextual information so that component instance behaviour can be generalised to component type behaviour. Furthermore, architecture description languages can be used to describe the complex architectures in which the generalised behaviours need to be instantiated. Thus, architectural information used in conjunction with scenario-based model synthesis can support both model construction and elaboration, where the behaviour derived from simple architecture fragments can be instantiated in more complex ones.