Decision-making for systems architecting using meta-languages

This paper introduces a language-oriented approach to manage the possibility spaces of a system architecture as logical partitions of design spaces. It uses a computable language to recursively represent these sub-spaces. We use the notion of narrowing and widening, first introduced by Cousot, to demonstrate that the decision-making process in architectural design can be formulated as a fixed-point search process in an algebraic domain of design representation languages. This paper contains background material, a description of the algebraic domain algebra of systems (AoS), and describes a meta-language for systems architecting, object-process network (OPN). Some applications of this method to architectural decision-making in space systems engineering and other fields are discussed.