Structural Formalization of Design-Pattern Based Software Design

In this paper, we present a formalism to represent pattern-based design of an application in terms of design-patterns, their instances, glue, operators and their required parameter-sets. These operators include instantiation, evolution and composition. Structural formalism is modeled in terms of entities and relationship between them. Constraints are defined for entities and relationship between them and these must be honored during composition to ensure the consistency of resultant design. Design pattern composition generally need additional design elements either for efficiency consideration or due to application need. We call such elements as glue. We have also modeled glue using same abstraction as of patterns. We demonstrate our model through an application design example.