An Architectural Modeling Approach with Symmetric Alignment of Multiple Concern Spaces

Architectural modeling identifies several concerns in problem domain and associates them with design decisions in solution domain. There is, however, no commonsense on how to localize problem domain concerns and relate them to the solution domain. This paper proposes a modeling approach to address the architectural concerns in multiple concern spaces both for problem and solution domains, and align them "symmetrically". This approach identifies the problem domain in multiple concern spaces by correlating the "architectural aspects" and "quality attributes". The solution domain is likewise identified in other multiple concern spaces by correlating the "multi-views" and "multi-tiers" of architectures. Symmetric alignment is used here for the correlation between separate concern spaces instead of mapping individual concerns from problem to solution domain. The paper claims that this alignment helps identifying architectural components, connectors and properties in the solution domain.