Adding Aspects to Software Architecture

An architectural aspect is a concern that spreads across architecture modularity units and cannot be effectively modularized using conventional Architecture Description Languages (ADLs). Dealing with crosscutting concerns is not trivial task since they effect each other and the base architectural decomposition in multiple heterogeneous ways. Lack of ADLs that support modularly representing such aspectual heterogeneous influences leads to a number of architectural breakdowns, such as increased overhead, reduce of reusability, and architectural erosion over the lifetime of the system. In this paper we present Aspectual COSA (ACOSA), a simple and seamless extension of the COSA architectural model to support a modular representation of architectural aspects and their multiple composition forms. ACOSA promotes natural blending of aspects and architectural abstractions by employing a special kind of architectural elements, called Aspectual Component (AC) to encapsulate aspectual behaviors and Aspectual Connector (ACN) to encapsulate both base-component and aspect interactions details.