Layouting of generated ArchiMate-based EA models

The discipline of Enterprise Architecture (EA) is an established approach to model and manage the interaction of businesses processes and IT in an organization. Thereby, the EA model as a central artifact of EA is subject to a continuous evolution caused by multiple sources of changes. This requires a lot of effort in controlling and managing the evolution of the EA model, which leads to very time-consuming and error-pron tasks.

In order to reduce the manual effort for the maintenance of EA models the SWC chair implemented a continuous delivery (CD) pipeline for EA model evolution using JARVIS and ArchiMate EA models. The CD pipeline is composed of several transformation and assessment algorithms. The transformation processes take ArchiMate models in xml format as input and apply different transformations on the model.

However, currently all transformations work on the model data only without including any visual data. Due to this, at the end of a successful pipeline run the end user cannot see the effects of the transformation algorithms in the resulting EA model. The resulting artifact is yet abstract. Even though such transformations exist in the UML domain, such as the UML Model Transformation Tool, there are yet no such implementations in the EA modelling tool domain.

Therefore, we want to extend the transformation algorithms by including the visualization data of an ArchiMate model in the transformation algorithms. This will enable us to evaluate our CD pipeline and showcase our solution at conferences and industry partners.

References:

• https://swc.rwth-aachen.de/thesis/architecture-self-organizing-continuous-delivery-pipelines/
• A. Sabau, S. Hacks, A. Steffens: Implementation of a Continuous Delivery Pipeline for EA Model Evolution, (in Review). Feb. 2020
• R. Grønmo, J. Oldevik: An Empirical Study of the UML Model Transformation Tool (UMT), INTEROP-ESA 2005

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