Towards Event-Driven Enterprise Architecture

Abstract

Enterprise Architecture (EA) has been researched to supply components for enterprise system modelling, including taxonomies, meta-models, architecture development methods, and modelling tools. However, EA now faces a big challenge due to the rapidly changing market demands and business environments. From the technology point of view, there are already matured, promising paradigms that tackle this challenge, such as Complex Event Processing (CEP). However, this has not been fully explored with EA. This chapter investigates the possibility of integrating Event Driven Architecture (EDA) into EA modelling. A modelling framework, “Event Driven Enterprise Architecture Modelling Framework” (EDEMF), is proposed for the adoption of complex events as a main viewpoint and incorporation of event process modelling in EA. An event-centric thinking is applied to the contextual analysis, followed by a translation of the analysis into conceptual and logical EA models, including complex event model; the EA models are then transformed into physical models grounded in existing or new enterprise system components. This approach has been achieved by providing an extension to ArchiMate, an EA modelling language. The feasibility of the proposed approach is demonstrated using a case study that applies to a student internship program. The case study uses a semantic web platform.