Definition of reference architectures based on existing systems

The success of a product family depends greatly on the quality of its reference architecture. To achieve high-quality reference architectures, it is important to leverage the experience embodied in successful systems from the same set of domains. However, the literature provides limited guidance on how to mine prior related systems for this specific purpose. This report addresses this issue by introducing an approach, which defines the views needed to express the architectures of a specific product family, recovers and analyzes these views, and provides a systematic process to define the reference architecture integrating the experience of past systems. This first version of this document focuses on architectural views: how they can be recovered, and how architectures can be analyzed and compared among themselves. The second version will emphasize the selection of reuse candidates and the development of the reference architecture for the product family.