We are almost ready to begin examining the synthetic process of creating system architecture, which starts in earnest in Chapter 9. The remaining steps we need to understand to complete Part 2 is how concept expands to architecture. Concept is a notional mapping between function and instruments of form, whereas architecture is a fairly comprehensive description of the relationships between internal functions and instruments of form.
As discussed in Chapter 7, the amount of information required to describe a system is defined by the solution-neutral functional intent and by the concept—the amount of information needed to fill in the template of Figure 7.4. The amount of information needed to describe the architecture is orders of magnitude larger. For example, the concept of a pump or that of bubblesort can be described by one line, but to describe the architecture, we need to present all of the information from Chapter 6.
Table 8.1 lists all the key questions from Chapters 4 through 7. These questionsThe questions listed in Table 1 approximately summarize the information needed to document an architecture. The questions are listed in the order in which they are addressed during the synthesis of an architecture. Table 8.1 includes questions about form (Chapter 4), function (Chapter 5), form-to-function mapping (Chapter 6), and solution-neutral function and concept (Chapter 7). Two new questions, 8a and 8b, are added in this chapter. These questions relate to extending an architecture from Level 1 to Level 2, and possible modularization of Level 2 objects.
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The main tasks in developing the Level 1 architecture are summarized in Questions 5c through 6g and discussed in Section 8.2. Then we need to recursively apply these steps to develop the Level 2 architecture and a scheme for modularization. This is the topic of Questions 8a and 8b and is discussed in Sections 8.3 through 8.5.
In this chapter, we will use the air transportation system as the running example to illustrate the tasks. In Section 8.4, we will summarize the process by developing an architecture for the home data network.
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