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P. Waibel:
"Architecture-driven Design and Configuration of Messaging Systems";
Supervisor: S. Dustdar, C. Dorn; Institut für Informationssysteme, Distributed Systems Group, 2015; final examination: 2015-04-14.

Nowadays, the use of services as the foundation stone, to develop a complex and reliable system, is an established method. These systems are composed of several services, where each of them fulfills a special (sub-)task in the overall service-oriented system. Such a system has the characteristics of extremely loose coupled services, unpredictable service availability, dynamically changing numbers of service instances and discourages a central execution control system.
Among other methods, a message-based communication is an approved and natural way for the services to communicate. Nevertheless the design and development of a consistent messagebased service system isn´t trivial at all. To be more specific, it is a major problem to achieve
an overall consistent configuration, where the messages get routed as it is provided in the design of the system. Whereas orchestration and choreography-based approaches have proved to be successful in designing composite services in workflow-centric styled systems, they aren´t quite as useful in systems with a message-centric architecture. Though, in different scenarios, a message-centric architecture can be a better match for complex service systems that have the characteristics outlined above.
The goal of this work is to investigate how a software architecture-centric approach can be used to design and configure message-based service systems. More specifically, the approach uses an architecture description language (ADL) to model the high-level architecture of
a message-based service system, and to configure the message relevant aspects of the services, respectively system. Furthermore, consistency checking is performed on the ADL document to ensure the consistency of the system. Finally, the package is completed by an architecture-toconfiguration transformation, which ensures the correct implementation of the planned system. Furthermore changes of the system, which may be done at a later point in time, are propagated
to the already transformed system without losing any information.
To prove the utility of the approach, a prototype, on basis of xADL and ArchStudio 4, is developed. The prototypical application is designed to transform the modeled and configured architecture into Mule ESB workflows and Apache ActiveMQ configuration files. Furthermore this prototype is used to implement a real world service system.