'Living' Architecture Overviews - Supporting the Design of Evolutionary Complex Systems (CD ROM)

When dealing with complex systems, it is essential that designers and system architects have a clear understanding of the system as a whole. The main ‘tool’ for this is the so-called ‘system architecture description’ or ‘reference architecture’. Although the concept of system architecture description and what should it include is still open for discussion, its utility and potential benefits have largely been proved and supported by manifold papers and experts. Overviews of the system and its environment are the core of this system architecture description. However, HOW to create those overviews of complex systems is uncertain. Even more difficult is to keep those overviews up-to-date to be continually used. The purpose of this paper is to propose an approach to create a ‘living’ overview of a complex system in order to support system designers and architects in the creation of products. An example based on previous work conducted at Philips Medical Systems with a real complex system (MRI scanner) will be described.