An architecture design method for the Vessel Prognostics and Health Management domain

Vessel Prognostics and Health Management Systems (VPHMSs) provide error detections and decisions of maintenance for important vessel equipment. However, commonality and variability among a series of VPHMSs are not considered during the development processes, which lead to low reusability of software resources. How to construct the VPHMSs' architecture quickly for a particular type of vessel and how to use these architectures in system developments are urgent problems in the VPHMS domain. In this paper an architecture design methodology for VPHMSs is introduced. Firstly, based on the analysis of domain business and existing systems, we extract domain common and variable requirements. Secondly, establish variability model. Finally, we design the domain architecture to derive specific system architectures, and this method was verified through a case study.