Perspective-based Architectural Approach for Dependable Systems

Explicitly architecting dependable systems inevitably involves establishing consensus among different stakeholders' concerns and then anchoring the design on architectural components that provide robustness. The goal is to architect evolvable systems upon which users can reasonably rely on receiving anticipated services. Unfortunately, there are few established approaches for rapidly prototyping architecture to identify dependable architectural components during the early stakeholder requirements resolution phases of software design. This paper presents a perspective-based architectural (PBA) approach process using rapid prototyping to build dependable architectures using compositional patterns. The approach is achieved through explicit architecting and system composition to provide a set of rules governing the system composition from coarser-grained dependable components. The approach provides a rationale for treating dependability as a set of semantic constraints localized on compositional patterns.