Software Engineering Institute

The Architecture-Based Design (ABD) Method is a method for designing the software architecture of a product line of systems. It has previously been described in the technical report, The Architecture Based Design Method (CMU/SEI-2000-TR-001). This report elaborates an example of the application of this method to designing the software architecture. The example is the house of the future.

The house of the future is assumed to have a collection of devices within the house that are controlled by a computer network. Entertainment, security, heating/air-conditioning, and utility devices will all interoperate and will be controlled from a central network. The software architecture to support the house must be extendable and flexible, and it must have high security, high performance, and high availability. In this report, we present a first-level decomposition of the software architecture as a demonstration of the ABD Method.