IDEA-ARCH - Intelligent & Data-driven Engineering for Software ArchitectureECSA 2026

Call for Papers

Software architecture is a knowledge-intensive and decision-centric discipline in which architects continuously reason about trade-offs, quality attributes, and long-term system evolution. Architectural knowledge is documented through heterogeneous artifacts such as ADRs, design rationale, documentation, repositories, issue discussions, communication traces and code-level dependencies. As systems evolve and architectural complexity increases, manual analysis of such knowledge becomes increasingly difficult. Despite the increasing availability of such data, architectural activities largely remain manual, and experience driven. Recent advances in AI, MSR, NLP, Data-driven analytics, Data mining & Knowledge extraction and Computational intelligence enable new opportunities to support architectural reasoning in a systematic and evidence-based manner. At the same time, these approaches raise important challenges related to explainability, trust, empirical validation, and integration into architectural workflows.

IDEA-Arch 2026 focuses on intelligent and data-driven approaches that support architectural reasoning and decision-making across the software architecture life cycle. The workshop explores how AI, NLP, Data mining & Knowledge extraction, Computational Intelligence, and Data-driven Software engineering techniques can assist architects in understanding architectural knowledge, evaluating design trade-offs, managing technical debt, and reasoning about architectural evolution. The goal of the workshop is to advance evidence-based understanding of how intelligent methods can assist architects in reasoning under uncertainty, managing architectural complexity, and sustaining architectural quality over time.

IDEA-Arch 2026 invites high-quality contributions related to the following topics:

• NLP-based analysis of architectural descriptions

• Mining Software Repositories (MSR) for Software Architecture

• Automated extraction and classification of architectural concerns & knowledge

• Artificial Intelligence advances (LLMs/Gen-AI) and their implications for Software Architecture

• Computational intelligence techniques for architectural trade-off analysis

• Architectural decision-making under uncertainty

• Recommendation Systems for architectural tactics and patterns

• Automated detection of architecture smells and Technical Debt

• Automated, semi-automated tool support for Architectural analysis & Knowledge Management

• Architectural evolution patterns mining

• Automated recovery and tracking of architectural decisions over time

• Explainability and transparency of intelligent architectural analysis tools

• Empirical validation strategies for intelligent architectural methods

Submission Types and Review Process:

The workshop welcomes the following types of submissions:

• Full research papers (up to 16 pages, LNCS format) presenting research contributions with methodological rigor and strong empirical grounding

• Short or position papers (up to 8 pages, LNCS format) describing emerging ideas, preliminary results, work-in-progress or critical perspectives

• Experience reports (up to 8 pages, LNCS format) describing industrial applications, challenges, and lessons learned from applying intelligent methodologies in software architecture

All submissions must follow the Springer LNCS format. Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the program committee based on the relevance to workshop scope, methodological rigor and appropriateness, clarity, and contribution to the field of software architecture. Accepted papers will be included in the workshop proceedings of ECSA 2026.

More Information can be found on the workshop website: https://ideaarchw.github.io/