Design and evaluation criteria for layered architectures

Abstract

The terms architecture, layered architecture and system architecture are often used by researchers, as well as system architects and business process analysts inconsistently. Furthermore, the concept architecture is commonplace in discussions of software engineering topics such as business process management and system engineering, but agreed upon design and evaluation criteria are lacking in literature. Such criteria are on the one hand valuable for the determination of system architectures during the design phase, and on the other hand, provides a valuable tool for the evaluation of already existing architectures. The goal of this paper is thus to extract from literature and best-practices such a list of criteria. The authors applied these findings to two prominent examples of layered architectures, notably the ISO/OSI network model and the Semantic Web language architecture.