On architecture specification

The design, specification, and correct implementation of an architectural design are after the task of requirements specification the perhaps most important design decisions, when building large software or software based systems. Architectures are responsible for software quality, for a number of quality attributes such as maintainability, portability, changeability, reusability but also reliability, security, and safety. Therefore, the design of architectures is a key issue in system and software development. For highly distributed, networked systems and for cyber-physical systems we need a design concept which supports composition, parallelism, and concurrency and finally real time but keeps all of the general advantages of object-oriented programming. We describe an approach to specify and implement systems along the lines of some of the established concepts of object-orientation – such as inheritance and class instantiation. This leads to an approach that nevertheless provides an execution model which is parallel and concurrent in nature and supports real time and modular composition. This way, it lays the foundation of a software and systems engineering style where classical object-orientation can be extended to cyber-physical systems in straightforward way.