A generic model for software architectures

In other industries, the idea of build corporate culture by establishing a common level of "best practice" is widely known and used. The architecture concept directly supports this goal for our industry and can help us improve problem areas dominated by organizational and social issues, such as health care organizations, educational systems, and so on. Our proposed reference model for architecture specification and development is organized around a set of aspects that structure concepts and rules; these, in turn, specify a conceptual architecture. We have added principles and guidelines to the concepts and rules to give a more complete picture of the architecture and to provide a place to store and communicate successfully applied design patterns and other knowledge related to the architecture. Adding architectural elements is a step toward a more constructive type of architecture representation. Our current research is focused on further refining these concepts and developing a formal specification of the architecture reference model. We are continuing to test our ideas in case studies, such as applying our model to the OSCA architecture and the application machine concept. We are also developing a prototype architecture editor, and we are testing different tools to learn more about integrating them into a real infrastructure and to learn what typical services an infrastructure must provide.