Architecture Diagrams: A Graphical Language for Architecture Style   Specification
  Architecture styles characterise families of architectures sharing common characteristics. We have recently proposed configuration logics for architecture style specification. In this paper, we study a graphical notation to enhance readability and easiness of expression. We study simple architecture diagrams and a more expressive extension, interval architecture diagrams. For each type of diagrams, we present its semantics, a set of necessary and sufficient consistency conditions and a method that allows to characterise compositionally the specified architectures. We provide several examples illustrating the application of the results. We also present a polynomial-time algorithm for checking that a given architecture conforms to the architecture style specified by a diagram. 
Anastasia Mavridou (\'Ecole polytechnique f\'ed\'erale de Lausanne),   Eduard Baranov (\'Ecole polytechnique f\'ed\'erale de...
cs.SE