Driving the composition of runtime platforms by architectural knowledge

Reusing app roved components is an a ttractive approach for the c ustomization o f runtime platforms in an economically sensible manner. However, the successful t ransition from particular requirements to a suitable architecture including appropriate components heavily relies on the expertise of t he system designers. In this paper, we propose an a rchitecture-driven approach to support runtime platform developers in the c omposition o f customized p latforms. Central to this approach is the explicit consideration of architectural aspects on an intermediate level of description. At this level, the appropriate matching o f requirements against properties of available components is controlled by formalized architectural knowledge. With SDL patterns and design spaces we present t wo techniques for performing this mapping process.