Towards a theory of architectural styles

Abstract

Architectural styles and patterns play an important role in software architectures. However, they are usually only stated informally, which may cause problems such as ambiguity and wrong conclusions. A rigorous theory of architectural styles --- consisting of (i) mathematical models for each style; (ii) axioms to identify different variants of a style; and (iii) rigorous analyses by means of mathematical proofs --- would address these problems. With this work we report on our progress towards such a rigorous theory of architectural styles.