AEvol - Architecture Evolution

Project Description

Aevol investigates how to represent, plan, and analyse evolution from an architectural perspective. Architects need ways to specify alternative paths of evolution and tools that allow them to analyse and trade-off these alternatives.

The key insight of our approach is that at the archtiectural level, system evolutions follow certain common patterns, dictacted by the style of archtiecture that their origin and target architectures conform to. By taking advantage of regularity in the space of common architectural evolutions we can provide automated assistance for capturing and reusing knowledge about architectural evolution. Specifically, we refer to collections of related paths as evolution styles.

Evolution styles can be defined, reasoned about, analyzed, applied to the evolution of specific systems, and supported by tools. By capturing such styles we not only raise the level of abstraction for representing specific evolution paths, but also provide the opportunity for reuse, path analysis, decision automation, tradeoff analysis, and formal guarantees of correctness.

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Research focus of ABLE Group

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