Abstract
Enterprise Architecture (EA) models are tools that capture the entities and relationships that together describe the different enterprise domains. An EA meta-model defines a set of constructs and rules that explicitly specify how to build an EA model. Over time, to keep up with the evolutionary pressure due to internal and external factors, organisations need to evolve their EA meta-model and, consequently, update the existing EA model. In this paper, we present LM2F, a framework for co-evolving the EA model driven by a set of changes to the EA meta-model. The framework has two building blocks: a life-cycle temporal pattern based on the principles of life-cycle modelling and a catalogue of operators that update the EA model automatically. The LM2F goal is to reduce the modelling time required to manually update the EA model when the EA meta-model changes and to mitigate the error-proneness, also associated with manual modelling. LM2F also supports temporal analysis of the organisation’s EA due to its life-cycle properties. For illustrating the feasibility of LM2F, we describe a real use case scenario from the energy industry. The use case is realised using an implementation of LM2F in an EA management tool.
Recommended Citation
Silva, Nuno; Gonçalves, Paloma; Leite, Inês; Sousa, Pedro; and Mira da Silva, Miguel, (2019). "LM2F: A LIFE-CYCLE MODEL MAINTENANCE FRAMEWORK FOR CO-EVOLVING ENTERPRISE ARCHITECTURE META-MODELS AND MODELS". In Proceedings of the 27th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS), Stockholm & Uppsala, Sweden, June 8-14, 2019. ISBN 978-1-7336325-0-8 Research Papers.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/ecis2019_rp/6