Abstract:
Having come of age in the last decade, the use of architecture
to describe complex systems, especially in software,
is now maturing. With our current ability to describe, represent,
analyse and evaluate architectures comes the next
logical step in our application of architecture to system
design and optimisation. Driven by the increasing scale
and complexity of modern systems, the designers have been
forced to find new ways of managing the difficult and complex
task of balancing the quality trade-offs inherent in
all architectures. Architecture-based optimisation has the
potential to not only provide designers with a practical
method for approaching this task, but also to provide a
generic mechanism for increasing the overall quality of
system design. In this paper we explore the issues that
surround the development of architectural optimisation and
present an example of heuristic-based optimisation of a
system with respect to concrete goals.
