A knowledge domain structure to enable system wide reasoning and decision making

To architect and design a system, the stakeholder needs have to be satisfied by technical solutions, for which decisions on trade-offs have to be made. A trend is that the number of functions, components, and interfaces in systems increase, often by an order of magnitude or more, such that reasoning about the impact of a decision becomes increasingly hard and tracing its impact throughout the system is crucial. Therefore, we decompose a system in areas of knowledge and information, which we call knowledge domains. Architecting means taking decisions, for which the impact on knowledge domains and their explicit relations are required. Existing approaches that reason across systems either do not make explicit relations between knowledge domains, or perform a quantitative computation instead of reasoning, where for both it is difficult to trace the impact of decisions.