A Scalable Approach to Multi-style Architectural Modeling and Verification

Software Architecture represents the high level description of a system in terms of components, external properties and communication. Despite its importance in the software engineering process, the lack of formal description and verification support limits the value of developing architectural models. Automated formal engineering methods can provide an effective means to precisely describe and rigorously verify intended structures and behaviors of software systems. In this paper, we present an approach to support the design and verification of software architectural models using the Alloy analyzer. Based on our earlier work, we propose a fundamental library for specifying system structures in terms of different architectural styles. We illustrate use of the architecture style library in modeling and verifying a complex system that utilizes multi-style structures. To promote scalability, we use model decomposition to parallelize the verification process. Results show that our approach enhances the performance of verifying models significantly.