Please choose your delivery country and your customer group
The objective of this study is to develop a systematic approach to the architectural design of complex software systems. This contract builds on earlier work, in which a graph modelling and decomposition methodology was used to operate upon a set of functional requirements and their interrelationships to generate an architectural design. In this report, certain extensions to the graph model employed to model the requirements are analyzed. Proposed extensions include: (a) implementation nodes; (b) weights on interdependency links; (c) links between implementation nodes; and (d) various types of directed links. The proposed extensions are applied to a small design problem (the design of a 22-requirement database management system) used in earlier work, and found to be implementable - that is, the information that must be supplied by a software designer to establish the model structure in a particular case can be determined in a reasonable length of time. (Author)