As smart systems leverage capabilities of heterogeneous systems for accomplishing complex combined behaviors, they pose new challenges to traditional software engineering practices that considered software architectures to be mostly static and stable. The software architecture of a smart system is inherently dynamic due to uncertainty surrounding its operational environment. While the abstract architecture offers a way to implicitly describe different forms taken by the software architecture at run time, it is still not sufficient to guarantee that all concrete architectures will automatically adhere to it. To address this issue, this work presents a formal method named Ark supporting the architectural synthesis of smart systems. This is achieved by expressing abstract architectures as a set of constraints that must be valid for any concrete architecture of the smart system. This way, we can benefit from existing model-checking techniques to guarantee that all concrete architectures realized from such an abstract model will comply with well-formed rules. We also describe how this method can be incorporated to a model-driven approach for bridging the gap between abstract and concrete architectural models. We demonstrate our method in an illustrative case study, showing how Ark can be used to support the synthesis of concrete architectures as well check the correctness and completeness of abstract architecture descriptions. Finally, we elaborate on future directions to consolidating a process for the synthesis of run-rime architectures that are correct-by-construction.

中文翻译：

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方舟：基于约束的智能系统架构综合方法

随着智能系统利用异构系统的功能来完成复杂的组合行为，它们对传统的软件工程实践提出了新的挑战，传统的软件工程实践认为软件体系结构主要是静态和稳定的。由于围绕其运行环境的不确定性，智能系统的软件体系结构固有地是动态的。尽管抽象体系结构提供了一种在运行时隐式描述软件体系结构采用的不同形式的方法，但仍不足以保证所有具体体系结构都将自动遵循该体系结构。为了解决这个问题，这项工作提出了一种名为Ark的形式化方法，用于支持智能系统的体系结构综合。这是通过将抽象体系结构表示为一组约束而实现的，这些约束对于智能系统的任何具体体系结构都必须有效。这样，我们可以从现有的模型检查技术中受益，以确保从这样的抽象模型实现的所有具体架构都将遵循格式正确的规则。我们还将描述如何将此方法合并到模型驱动的方法中，以弥合抽象建筑模型与具体建筑模型之间的差距。我们在一个示例性案例研究中演示了我们的方法，展示了如何使用Ark支持具体架构的综合以及检查抽象架构描述的正确性和完整性。最后，我们详细说明了未来的发展方向，以巩固用于逐个构造正确的行车架构的综合过程。