The Software Engineering Institute makes an important distinction between formal and informal methods. Formal methods, such as "Z" demand a high level of structure, currently not achievable (or at least achieved) beyond a small subset of architecture or specification problems. Many of the methods used in architecture are at best "structured" methods. Many so-called methods are just "line and box drawings, and cannot even make the claim to be 'structured".    The behaviour of each component of interest in the context of a structure is part of the architecture, insofar as that behaviour can be observed or discerned from the point of view of another component. This behaviour is what allows components to interact with each other, which is clearly part of the architecture. Hence, most of the box-and-line drawings that are passed off as architectures are in fact not architectures at all. They are simply box-and-line drawings.

Structured methods used in the development of composite models include:

• UML 2.0
• Business Rules
• System Dynamics Models
• Data Models (critical to address the semantic issues assumed in UML) see Information Engineering

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