Software Architecture Styles as Graph Grammars

We present a formalism for the definition of software architectures in terms of graphs. Nodes represent the individual agents and edges define their interconnection. Individual agents can communicate only along the links specified by the architecture. The dynamic evolution of the overall architecture is defined independently by a `coordinator'. An architecture style is a class of architectures characterised by a graph grammar. The rules of the coordinator are statically checked to ensure that they preserve the constraints imposed by the architecture style. Keywords: coordination, graph rewriting, software architecture, static verification. 1 Motivation and approach Software systems tend to grow in size and complexity; they are often developed through a long period of time and become extremely difficult to understand and to maintain. The cost incurred by this complexity is becoming a serious concern and a major challenge today is to provide ways of organising software in order to make..