Adaptive Approach for Impact Analysis in Enterprise Architectures

Due to the large size of typical Enterprise Architecture models, it is often difficult for humans to fully grasp their contents. Moreover, because of their inherent complexity, the task of generating additional value from these models is very challenging without suitable analysis methods. Impact analysis, which determines the effects of changes or failures on other architectural elements, can therefore provide valuable information for enterprise architects. Whether an element is affected depends on its context, i.e. its (transitive) connections to other elements and their semantics with respect to the analysis. In this paper, we propose a generic, context-sensitive approach to the implementation of impact analyses. This method relies on the technique of data-flow analysis to propagate the effects through the model. Since the analysis specification only relies on a set of relationship classes, it can be easily adapted to the needs of organization-specific EA meta models by providing custom mappings for the respective types.