Who Builds the Architects

Abstract

Taking the design tool—an engineering artifact spanning six decades—as its starting point, this paper traces the principal line of evolution from the constraint solver in Sutherland's 1963 Sketchpad to the contemporary toolchains of MBSE, EDA, and AUTOSAR. It advances a proposition that vendor market narratives routinely obscure: the deepest identity of a design tool is constraint maintenance, not graphical depiction. On this basis, the paper repurposes the AI²-ML (Architecture Intelligence Maturity Levels) framework established across the trilogy—turning it from a measure of the architecture being designed to a measure of the tool that designs it. It scores the core species of the automotive architecture toolchain along five dimensions (D1–D5: constraint-awareness depth, reference-architecture integration, AI-assisted generation, AI reasoning autonomy, and interoperability), and composes these into an overall L0–L5 level under an aggregation rule that takes D1 and D4 as its twin reasoning axes. Every score rests on standards specifications and official vendor documentation as first-tier evidence, within a 2024.1–2026.1 evaluation window.

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