Model-Based System Architecture, 2nd Edition

19Architecture Frameworks

The term architecture framework is frequently misunderstood. It is often assumed that an architecture framework provides a kind of abstract or common template for a system's architecture. Something like a “skeleton architecture” of a certain kind of system, which only needs to be completed and detailed to get a full-fledged architecture for this system. For example, one could guess that the general architecture for an aircraft, such as body, wings, propulsion subsystem, landing gears, power, and energy subsystem, is abstractly defined in a kind of “Architecture Framework for Aircrafts,” and the systems engineer could use that framework as a starting point for an aircraft's system architecture.

But that's not correct.

Of course, there are proven base architectures (see Section C.2), sometimes also called reference architectures, for miscellaneous kinds of systems in the systems engineering domain, but architecture frameworks did not define them!

But what are architecture frameworks instead? The international standard ISO/IEC/IEEE 42010:2011 Systems and software engineering – Architecture description [114] defines architecture framework as conventions, principles, and practices to describe an architecture. An architecture framework according to the standard is for a specific domain of application or community of stakeholders.

As a first notice about this definition is that it is about the description of architectures. So that these architecture descriptions ...