The concept of a family of architectural representations is generally thought to be groupings of common architectural designs. Within MORALE we have the problem of possibly many versions of the architecture of a legacy system, plus many ideas for candidate architectures for the evolved system. In considering how families are defined in ACME within MORALE, we have 2 major choices:
The are two biggest considerations in choosing an option are the .acme file size and the processing overhead of parsing system descriptions of versions of the system not under evaluation by MORALE. In order to minimize both these factors, I chose the second option, limiting the family definition to only those system views that are involved in the current analysis of the legacy system. If there are previous Acme descriptions of other versions they are not included (unless of course their definition is being evaluated by one of the MORALE tools).
There is a fundamental that must be made about where to place the computational complexity of building a detailed ACME representation of an architecture.