Architecture conformance checking with description logics

Today, a lot of commercial and open source tools exist allowing to describe the intended architecture and to check architecture conformance automatically in order to detect and eventually minimize erosion. Unfortunately, those tools are restricted in terms of which architecture concepts can be used in order to describe the intended architecture. Additionally, those approaches lack an appropriate formal foundation in terms of a well-defined syntax and semantic. Nevertheless, this is a crucial requirement for automatic support in architecture conformance checking. In this paper, we propose a formal approach enabling a) the definition of an architecture concept language that allows to capture the most important architecture concepts and their related architecture rules, b) the validation of the consistency of this language, c) the mapping of architecture concepts to source code and capturing this mapping in an explicit language in order to d) check architecture conformance. We also present an evaluation of the approach using the Common Component Modeling Example (CoCoME) case study in order to demonstrate the applicability.