Towards an object oriented method for system architecture design

The basic thoughts behind a method extending the scope of object-oriented approaches toward modeling the architecture of large systems is presented. The method integrates the traditional 'divide-and-conquer' approach with the object-structured approach which is building-block oriented and tends to be more bottom-up. In the large, two hierarchies dominate the thinking process: a top-down hierarchy of object instances and a bottom-up hierarchy of classes. In the small, the thinking process centers around communicating objects, which are self-contained models of parts of large systems. The basic communication mechanism is a generalized message-passing. The author elaborates how he has tried to overcome logical and physical complexity problems that arise when modeling architectures of larger systems.<>