Complex software systems are usually developed as systems of systems (SoS’s) in which multiple constituent applications are composed and coordinated to fulfill desired system-level requirements. The constituent applications must be augmented with suitable coordination-specific interfaces, through which they can participate in coordinated interactions. Such interfaces as well as coordination rules have a crosscutting nature. Therefore, to increase the reusability of the applications and to increase the comprehensibility of SoS’s, suitable mechanisms are required to modularize the coordination rules and interfaces from the constituent applications. We introduce a new abstraction named as architectural event modules (AEMs), which facilitate defining constituent applications and desired coordination rules as modules of SoS’s. AEMs augment the constituent applications with event-based facades to let them participate in coordinated interactions. We introduce the EventArch language in which the concept of AEMs is implemented, and illustrate its suitability using a case study.

Complex software systems are usually developed as systems of systems (SoS’s) in which multiple constituent applications are composed and coordinated to fulfill desired system-level requirements. The constituent applications must be augmented with suitable coordination-specific interfaces, through which they can participate in coordinated interactions. Such interfaces as well as coordination rules have a crosscutting nature. Therefore, to increase the reusability of the applications and to increase the comprehensibility of SoS’s, suitable mechanisms are required to modularize the coordination rules and interfaces from the constituent applications. We introduce a new abstraction named as architectural event modules (AEMs), which facilitate defining constituent applications and desired coordination rules as modules of SoS’s. AEMs augment the constituent applications with event-based facades to let them participate in coordinated interactions. We introduce the EventArch language in which the concept of AEMs is implemented, and illustrate its suitability using a case study.