Artificial Intelligence for Software Architecture: Literature Review and the Road Ahead

This paper presents a forward-looking vision for artificial intelligence-driven software architecture that addresses longstanding challenges in design and evolution. Although artificial intelligence has achieved notable success in software engineering, its explicit application to software architecture remains under-explored. Traditional practices, heavily reliant on expert knowledge and complex trade-off reasoning, tend to be manual and error-prone, thereby compromising system quality and maintainability. Building on recent advances, we examine how artificial intelligence can automate architectural design, support quantitative trade-off analyses, and continuously update architectural documentation. Our approach combines a systematic review of state-of-the-art applications with insights from industry practitioners. The resulting roadmap outlines 14 current artificial intelligence contributions to software architecture, identifies six artificial intelligence-specific challenges in supporting architectural tasks, and reveals six avenues for future improvement, charting a course for future research and practical implementations.