Abstract
Durable, robust architectures are of crucial importance for the competitiveness of companies like Siemens. The System Architecture Analysis (SAA) method enables the development of system architectures with a long lifetime. SAA pursues a comprehensive approach to optimize architectures which takes into account market strategy as well as technological aspects. Since 1993, SAA has been used to support definition and optimization of software and system architectures world-wide in Siemens+ computer system and industrial process groups.