Towards facilities for modeling and synthesis of architectures for resource allocation problem in systems engineering.

Exploring architectural design space is often beyond human capacity and makes architectural design a difficult task. Model-based systems engineering must include assistance to the system designer in identifying candidate architectures to subsequently analyze trade-offs. Unfortunately, existing languages and approaches do not incorporate this concern, generally favoring solution analysis over exploring a set of candidate architectures. In this paper, we explore the advantages of designing and configuring the variability problem to solve one of the problems of exploring (synthesizing) candidate architectures in systems engineering: the resource allocation problem. More specifically, this work reports on the use of the Clafer modeling language and its gateway to the CSP Choco Solver, on an industrial case study of heterogeneous hardware resource allocation (GPP-GPGPU-FPGA). Based on experiments on the modeling in Clafer, and the impact of its translation into the constraint programming paradigm (per-formance studies), discussions highlight some issues concerning facilities for modeling and synthesis of architectures and recommendations are proposed towards the use of this variability approach.