A system architecture or systems architecture is the conceptual model that defines the structure, behavior, and more views of a system.
An architecture description is a formal description and representation of a system, organized in a way that supports reasoning about the structures of the system, which comprise system components, the externally visible properties of those components, the relationships (e.g. the behavior) between them, and provides a plan from which products can be procured, and systems developed, that will work together to implement the overall system. More recently, there have been efforts to formalize languages to describe system architecture, collectively these are called architecture description languages (ADLs).
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