Enterprise Architecture with Executable Modelling Rules: A Case Study at the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration

Formal modeling rules can be used to ensure that an enterprise architecture is correct. Despite their apparent utility and despite mature tool support, formal modelling rules are rarely, if ever, used in practice in enterprise architecture in industry. In this paper we propose a rule authoring method that we believe aligns with actual modelling practice, at least as witnessed in enterprise architecture projects at the Swedish Defence Materiel Administration. The proposed method follows the business rules approach: the rules are specified in a (controlled) natural language which makes them accessible to all stakeholders and easy to modify as the meta-model matures and evolves over time. The method was put to test during 2014 in two large scale enterprise architecture projects, and we report on the experiences from that. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time extensive formal modelling rules for enterprise architecture has been tested in industry and reported in the