Abstract

Meshing tools are extremely complex pieces of software. Traditionally, they have been built in a one by one basis, without systematically reusing already developed parts. The area has matured so that we can currently think of building meshing tools in a more industrial manner. Software product lines is a trend in software development that promotes systematic reuse. We propose a layered product line architecture for meshing tools that can be instantiated with different algorithms, ways of implementing basic concepts, and even for two or three dimensional meshing tools. We specify it formally using xADL and we show that the architecture is compatible with a series of already built tools. This work is the beginning of a domain analysis that has the potential to go beyond the sometimes rigid descriptions provided by architectural description languages. © 2006 International Federation for Information Processing.