Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 4
Reusable System Architectures
The term architecture has various meanings, even in MMD. It can refer to
conceptual architecture, i.e. all the software components (modules) and
communication means between these components. It can be software
architecture, i.e. the materialization of the conceptual architecture as a
computational solution, for example a multi-agent system.
Moreover, architecture can refer to the system's organization as it runs,
thus reflecting its operation. We then talk of run-time architecture,a
conceptual architecture describing how the final system is built. First, it is a
diagram of modules, with a specification for each of input, output and
processes run, and second a diagram of the communications between
modules. Architecture can refer not just to the running but also the designing
of the system, i.e. not the system itself, but the system that enabled us to
create it. We then talk in that case of design-time architecture, which may (or
may not) happen during the design phase. More specifically, it is the
development system's conceptual architecture that created the MMD system.
This is essentially a set of sequential or parallel constraints, which creates a
software chain to help development by automatically deriving certain
resources from other resources, and automatically generating resources or
even modules from models. A toolkit is the software materialization of a
design-time architecture.
Once these definitions have been given, we can make various observations
compared to the past and current achievements in MMD. First observation:
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