Architectural design of the Health Watch system with an integrated aspect-oriented modeling approach

Crosscutting behaviors and features of architectural units have always been a tricky issue in software architecture design. If not well treated, they may lead to a number of architectural breakdowns, such as increased maintenance overhead, reduced reuse capability, and architectural erosion over the lifetime of a system. Unfortunately, traditional software modeling approaches lack abstraction to support the modular representation of crosscutting concerns. This paper employs a special kind of architectural component called Aspectual Component to encapsulate crosscutting behaviors and features to improve modularization, and extends the semantic of conventional connectors to represent the crosscutting effect of aspectual components. Moreover,we present a general-purpose aspect-oriented architecture description language AC-ADL for formal specification of the software architecture of systems. The whole designing process of the approach is illustrated systematically through a case study of HealthWatcher system.