Leveraging domain expertise in architectural exploration

Abstract

Domain experience is a key driver behind design quality, especially during the early design phases of a product or service. Currently, the only practical way to bring such experience into a project is to directly engage subject matter experts, which means there is the potential for a resource availability bottleneck because the experts are not available when required. Whilst many domain specific tools have attempted to capture expert knowledge in embedded analytics thus allowing less experienced engineers to perform complex tasks, this is certainly not the case for highly complex systems of systems where their architectures can go far beyond what a single human being can comprehend. This paper proposes a new approach to leveraging design expertise in a manner that facilitates architectural exploration and architecture optimization by using pre-defined architecture patterns. In addition, we propose a means to streamline such a process by delineating the knowledge creation process and architectural exploration analytics with the means to facilitate information flow from the former to the latter through a carefuly designed integration framework.