5.2 Process
5.2.1 Introduction
This section addresses the question of how to generate concrete architectures
with the IoT ARM, which is one of the many uses to which an architectural
reference model can be put (see Section 2.1). This topic was already touched
upon in Section 2.1.3, but it is covered in greater depth in this section.
Notice that we do not prescribe any particular architecting methodology for the
generation of concrete architectures. Rather, this section outlines how and
where during the architecting process the IoT ARM can provide aid and input to
the architect. We come back to this topic of ―methodology agnosticism‖ in
Section 5.2.3.
As can be seen in Section 2.1.3, the IoT ARM informs the engineering
strategies for the design of a concrete IoT system, and the transformation rules^6
are derived from the entirety of the IoT ARM. Also, the IoT ARM informs the
requirement-generation process. In this section we are focusing in greater detail
on the generation of requirements and on the transformation of these
requirements into a concrete architecture. Notice that a concrete architecture
implies that it meets a selected use case and application scenario.
Additionally to the information provided in this section, we also sketch the
architecture of a parking-by-license-plate IoT system that was derived by use of
the IoT ARM (see Section 5.3).
5.2.2 Process steps
What are the main building blocks of a domain-specific architecture that
adheres to the IoT ARM framework? The answer is: architectural views. As
discussed in the beginning of Chapter 3 , we chose to arrange a system
architecture according to views and the totality of all views constitutes the
architecture description. Figure 65 outlines how the views are related to each
other and how they contribute to the system design. All dark-red-shaded views
are covered in detail in the IoT Reference Architecture (see Chapter 4 ) or in this
section. These views are:
Physical-Entity View; Deployment View; Operational View; IoT Context View;(^6) Requirements concrete architecture.