Situation-based modeling framework for enterprise architecture

This thesis presents the Situation-Based Modeling Framework for Enterprise Architecture. This framework improves system modeling by making models more systemic and, therefore, making reasoning about these models easier. The context of this thesis is Enterprise Architecture (EA). EA enables enterprises to anticipate or react to necessary business or technical changes. EA models have to represent enterprises facets from marketing to IT. As a result, EA models tend to become large and complex. To cope with the complexities of large enterprise models, they are usually considered as compositions of smaller, manageable parts: concerns. We call Concern-Based Design Methods (CBDMs) the methods that support modeling with concerns. In order to understand how CBDMs can be used in EA, we have made the systemic analysis of twenty of the most influential CBDMs that can be used in the context of EA. In our analysis we have studied the ontological, epistemological, theoretical and methodological principles of the considered CBDMs. The result of the analysis shows that ontological and theoretical principles are often supported by CBDMs. These principles make CBDMs convenient for the management of systems' concerns: CBDMs explain how to define, store, compose and reuse systems' concerns. However, the support of methodological and epistemological principles in the existing CBDMs is often missing. In our work we concentrate on the support of the epistemological principles. Epistemology reflects the way human cognize. Without epistemological principles, CBDMs result in models that are difficult to understand and reasoning about. In this thesis we present a Situation-Based Modeling Framework. The novelty of our framework is its foundation in a set of epistemological principles. These principles originate from our state of the art analysis of the existing CBDMs. They allow for building models that are more systemic and, therefore, more comprehensible. Between them the following principles we consider as the most important in the context of EA: Situation Relativity: a modeling method should support explicit modeling of situations. State and Behavior Holism: the state (or data) and behavior models should be integrated in the context of EA. This allows for identifying breakdowns in behavior/data interactions and for specifying explicitly the life cycle of information elements: i.e. when and where information elements are created, used and deleted. Diagrammatic representation: this principle is especially important in the context of EA. EA design models should be used by specialists with different backgrounds. These specialists have to communicate in languages that can be rapidly understood by all of them. Visual languages help to solve this problem. The first principle plays the central role in the definition of our framework. In our Situation-Based Modeling Framework we propose to identify system concerns by means of considering a system of interest in a number of specif