Henk Obbink and Rob van Ommering
Philips Research
Prof. Holstlaan 4
5656 AA Eindhoven
The Netherlands
Henk.Obbink@philips.com, Rob.van.Ommering@philips.com

The presented approach views the architecture in the context of business, process and organization, leading to our BAPO (Business, Architecture, Process, and Organization) framework. In principle, the business concerns drive the architecture. The architecture in its turn drives the process, and the process drives the organization. The business deals with the mission and the market strategy of the company. The architecture describes what functionality should be provided by the product and how it should be realized (from market to technology). The process deals with the activities needed to effectively and efficiently produce product based on a component-based platform. Finally, the organizational issues that need to be considered include people, organizational skills, available knowledge, locations, etc. Of these four concerns, we will focus on the architecture and process.

The architecture itself is divided into five views, viz. Client, Application, Functional, Conceptual, and Realization (CAFCR). The customer view deals with the value drivers of the customer and the customer business models; it describes the essential characteristics with respect to the customer's world. Next, we have the application view, which deals with the applicational context in which our product can play a role. It gives the main characteristics of the application and provides a model of it. The third view is the functional view in which a commercial decomposition is given of a product that fits into the application domain. The decomposition consists of functions, features and options. Based on the functions that need to be provided, a conceptual view is created which is the first step in the design of the product family. It contains, among other things, a decomposition into product specific components and platform components. Finally, the realization view needs to be provided which contains a number of technical choices like the computing infrastructure, component model(s), libraries, etc.

Henk Obbink works at the Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven in the Architecture research group. The main goal of the group is to develop practical method for the architecting of software intensive electronic systems. Henk's current interests are computing based system engineering, software architecture, component based software engineering, systematic reuse, product line development and agent based systems.

He is member at large of the IEEE Technical Committee for the Engineering of Computer Based Systems (ECBS). He is member of the Technical Committee of the IFIP working group 2.10 on Software Architecture. He is chairing the international workshops on program family engineering. He was co-chair of the fourth international workshop on software architecture ISAW-4 at ICSE 2000 in Limerick in Ireland. He had been and is member of several program committees in software architecture and software engineering, e.g. ESEC, ISAW-3, ISAW-4, EWSPT_1995, EWSPT2000, NOSA98, 99, ICT-99, the first productline conference in Denver and the international conference on software reuse ICSR-6 in 2000.

Rob van Ommering joined Philips Research in 1982, and worked amongst others on software architecture verification and visualization. He is now researching software architectures for resource constrained products in consumer electronics product families. He is one of the creators of the component oriented software architecture that is currently used in television products of Philips Consumer Electronics, and is part-time global software architect of this family. He has given numerous presentations and various courses and tutorials on these topics, within Philips, at universities, and at conferences and workshops.