Consolidating a Process for the Design, Representation, and Evaluation of Reference Architectures

Reference architectures have emerged as a special type of software architecture that achieves well-recognized understanding of specific domains, promoting reuse of design expertise and facilitating the development, standardization, and evolution of software systems. Because of their advantages, several reference architectures have been proposed and have been also successfully used, including in the industry. However, the most of these architectures are still built using an ad-hoc approach, lacking of a systematization to their construction. If existing, these approaches could motivate and promote the building of new architectures and also support evolution of existing ones. In this scenario, the main contribution of this paper is to present the evolution of ProSA-RA, a process that systematizes the design, representation, and evaluation of reference architectures. ProSA-RA has been already applied in the establishment of reference architectures for different domains and this experience was used to evolve our process. In this paper, we illustrate an application of ProSA-RA in the robotics domain. Results achieved through the use of ProSA-RA have showed us that it is a viable, efficient process and, as a consequence, it could contribute to the reuse of knowledge in several applications domains, by promoting the establishment of new reference architectures.