You are required to read and agree to the below before accessing a full-text version of an article in the IDE article repository.

The full-text document you are about to access is subject to national and international copyright laws. In most cases (but not necessarily all) the consequence is that personal use is allowed given that the copyright owner is duly acknowledged and respected. All other use (typically) require an explicit permission (often in writing) by the copyright owner.

For the reports in this repository we specifically note that

  • the use of articles under IEEE copyright is governed by the IEEE copyright policy (available at http://www.ieee.org/web/publications/rights/copyrightpolicy.html)

  • the use of articles under ACM copyright is governed by the ACM copyright policy (available at http://www.acm.org/pubs/copyright_policy/)

  • technical reports and other articles issued by M‰lardalen University is free for personal use. For other use, the explicit consent of the authors is required

  • in other cases, please contact the copyright owner for detailed information

By accepting I agree to acknowledge and respect the rights of the copyright owner of the document I am about to access.

If you are in doubt, feel free to contact webmaster@ide.mdh.se

A Functional Software Reference Architecture for LLM-Integrated Systems

Fulltext:


Authors:

Alessio Bucaioni, Martin Weyssow , Junda He , Yunbo Lyu , David Lo

Publication Type:

Conference/Workshop Paper

Venue:

22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture


Abstract

The integration of large language models into software systems is transforming capabilities such as natural language understanding, decision-making, and autonomous task execution. However, the absence of a commonly accepted software reference architecture hinders systematic reasoning about their design and quality attributes. This gap makes it challenging to address critical concerns like privacy, security, modularity, and interoperability, which are increasingly important as these systems grow in complexity and societal impact. In this paper, we describe our emerging results for a preliminary functional reference architecture as a conceptual framework to address these challenges and guide the design, evaluation, and evolution of large language model-integrated systems. We identify key architectural concerns for these systems, informed by current research and practice. We then evaluate how the architecture addresses these concerns and validate its applicability using three open-source large language model-integrated systems in computer vision, text processing, and coding

Bibtex

@inproceedings{Bucaioni7129,
author = {Alessio Bucaioni and Martin Weyssow and Junda He and Yunbo Lyu and David Lo},
title = {A Functional Software Reference Architecture for LLM-Integrated Systems},
month = {March},
year = {2025},
booktitle = {22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture },
url = {http://www.ipr.mdu.se/publications/7129-}
}