Enterprise Architecture Model Transformation Engine
This addresses the difficulty of integrating IT systems across companies in Industry 4.0, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing pattern matching and rule-based techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of heterogeneity in enterprise architecture modeling frameworks and languages by presenting a transformation engine that converts models between languages, using a generic translation approach free of specific meta-modeling and evaluated in a practical example with a large German IT-service provider.
With increasing linkage within value chains, the IT systems of different companies are also being connected with each other. This enables the integration of services within the movement of Industry 4.0 in order to improve the quality and performance of the processes. Enterprise architecture models form the basis for this with a better buisness IT-alignment. However, the heterogeneity of the modeling frameworks and description languages makes a concatenation considerably difficult, especially differences in syntax, semantic and relations. Therefore, this paper presents a transformation engine to convert enterprise architecture models between several languages. We developed the first generic translation approach that is free of specific meta-modeling, which is flexible adaptable to arbitrary modeling languages. The transformation process is defined by various pattern matching techniques using a rule-based description language. It uses set theory and first-order logic for an intuitive description as a basis. The concept is practical evaluated using an example in the area of a large German IT-service provider. Anyhow, the approach is applicable between a wide range of enterprise architecture frameworks.