Automatic Translation of Architecture Constraint Specifications into Components

International audienceArchitecture constraints are specifications defined by developers at design-time and checked on design artifacts (architecture descriptions , like UML models). They enable to check, after an evolution, whether an architecture description still conforms to the conditions imposed by an architecture pattern, style or any design principle. One possible language for specifying such constraints is the OMG's OCL. Most of these architecture constraints are formalized as " gross " specifications, without any structure or parameterization possibilities. This causes difficulties in their reuse. We propose in this work a process for translating architecture constraints into a special kind of components called constraint-components. This makes these specifications reusable (easily put and checked out in/from repositories), parametrizable (generic and applicable in different contexts) and composable with others. We implemented this process by considering the translation of OCL constraints into constraint-components described with an ADL called CLACS