Supporting Change Propagation in the Evolution of Enterprise Architectures

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture (EA) models the whole vision of an organisation in various aspects regarding both business processes and information technology resources. As the organisation grows, the architecture governing its systems and processes must also evolve to meet with the demands of the business environment. In this context, a critical issue is change propagation: given a set of primary changes that have been made to the EA model, what additional secondary changes are needed to maintain consistency across multiple levels of the EA. This paper proposes an enterprise architectural description language, namely Change Aware Hierarchical EA, integrated with a framework to support change propagation within an EA model. The core part of our change propagation framework is a new method for generating interactive repair plans from Alloy consistency rules that constrain the EA model.