Four Reasoning Models for C3 Metamodel

International audienceThe architecture is considered to be the driving aspect of the development process; it allows specifying which aspects and models in each level needed according to the software architecture design. Early Architecture Description Languages (ADLs), nearly exclusive, focus on structural abstraction hierarchy ignoring behavioural description hierarchy, conceptual hierarchy, and metamodeling hierarchy. In our approach these four hierarchies constitute views to appropriately “reason about” the architecture of a system described using our C3 metamodel. C3 is defined to be a minimal and complete architecture description language. In this paper we provide a set of mechanisms to deal with different levels of each type of hierarchy, also we introduce our proper structural definition for connector types used to instantiate any connexion elements deployed at the architectures and application levels