Abstract
Crosscutting behaviors and features of architectural units have always been a tricky issue in software architecture design. If not well treated, they may cause some unnecessary coupling among architectural units and hamper maintenance, evolution and reusability of software products. Appropriate modeling approaches and expressions contribute to the solution of these problems. This paper proposes an Aspect-Oriented Software Architecture Design approach AOSAD to design the software architecture of systems. AOSAD employs a special kind of architectural component called Aspectual Component to encapsulate crosscutting behaviors and features to improve modularization, and introduces a special kind of connector called Aspectual Connector to make the complicated interaction more controllable. Additionally, this paper proposes a new Aspect-Oriented architecture description language AC2-ADL for formal specification of the software architecture of systems. The whole designing process of the approach is discussed systematically through a case study of Online Auction System in e-business domain.