Interaction-sensitive synthesis of architectural tactics in connector designs

During architectural design, the architect has to come up with a set of design decisions that in combination guarantee the fulfillment of non-functional requirements. One type of design decision is related to inter-component communication patterns captured through connector designs. Since connectors potentially impact big portions of a system, they are likely to be influenced by nonfunctional concerns in form of architectural tactics. In fact, decomposing connector designs along non-functional dimensions enables separation of concerns, however, the composition (or synthesis) of architectural tactics potentially yields incorrect connector models caused by so-called tactic interactions. In this paper, we describe an approach for detecting such interactions in connector designs during tactic synthesis. We extend existing work by formally defining, modeling, and checking compositional semantics of architectural tactics. Technically, we apply fluent linear temporal logic in order to capture and to model check desired properties automatically. Our approach is integrated in a commercial architecture design tool supporting automated interaction detection during connector design activities.