Transforming Goal Oriented requirements specifications into Architectural Prescriptions

In this paper we propose a new method to transform the requirements specification for a software system into an architectural specification for the system. In the introduction we illustrate the needs for this new method in the context of the software development process and we explain the concept of architecture prescription. Then, we give a brief overview of KAOS, the goal oriented requirements specification language we used as a starting point. We characterize the APL (Architecture Prescription Language) and show how to use it to derive an architecture prescription from the KAOS requirements. We then illustrate our technique with a practical example, namely the meeting-planning problem. Finally, we discuss related work and indicate future directions of our research. 1