An Integrated Modeling Approach to Enterprise Systems Architecture

Existing approaches to architecture description need to be enhanced as they fail to fully capture the unique characteristics of an enterprise system. T he architecture of a system is a specification that captures the structure and functionality of the system in an abstract manner. The specification should help various stakeholders to understand and analyze different functional and quality of service (QoS) aspects of the system before its construction, without providing overwhelming details. In most software projects, the architecture specification of an enterprise system is captured using informal box and line diagrams with textual annotations. The informal architecture specification is transformed to implementation through a manual development process where the specification is hypothetically related to the implementation (through manual verification). Such a description suffers from people-and project-specific idiosyncrasies leading to ambiguity, misinterpretation and often, erroneous implementation. Therefore, it is essential to capture architecture specification using formal notations with well-defined syntax and semantics – through a tool. A formal architecture specification should ideally capture all the aspects that are unique to the enterprise system and also help in reasoning various architecture decisions. An enterprise system typically automates one or more business processes. The system consists of several legacy and new applications that are integrated to realize the consistent whole. The enterprise system is implemented using multiple technology platforms, commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products that may be deployed in distributed hardware nodes. There have been several attempts in the past to model different aspects of the architecture.