A concept for describing concrete solutions to support their automated selection from patterns

Abstract

Patterns and pattern languages have been used to abstractly describe solutions of recurring problems in various domains. They are general enough to be applicable to many technologies and use-cases. However, with the generalness of patterns comes the problem of how to turn them into concrete solutions suitable for a specifc environment. To thisend, it was suggested to link patterns with sets of technology-specifc concrete solutions that implement them, and make them accessible via repositories. Nonetheless, users still lack the support to choose the suitable combination of concrete solutions that implement a pre-selected sequence of patterns. In our work, we aim at solving this problem by elaborating a conceptual design to describe it along with the various entities related to it, which is then used as a basis for a 2-phase algorithm that automatically selects concrete solutions based on a given sequence of patterns and certain environment- and user-specifc conditions. We finally evaluate our approach by studying the complexity of the algorithm and implementing a web-based prototype for it.