ArchiMate® 3.1 Specification. The Open Group
Egon Willemsz
The first version of this standard was largely produced by the ArchiMate project. The Open Group gratefully acknowledges the contribution of the many people – former members of the project team – who have contributed to it.
The ArchiMate project comprised the following organizations:
• ABN AMRO
• Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica
• Dutch Tax and Customs Administration
• Leiden Institute of Advanced Computer Science
• Novay
• Ordina
• Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen
• Stichting Pensioenfonds ABP
Referenced Documents
The following documents are referenced in this standard. These references are informative.
(Please note that the links below are good at the time of writing but cannot be guaranteed for the future.)
[1] Enterprise Architecture at Work: Modeling, Communication, and Analysis, Third Edition, M.M. Lankhorst et al., Springer, 2013.
[2] The Anatomy of the ArchiMate® Language, M.M. Lankhorst, H.A. Proper, H. Jonkers, International Journal of Information Systems Modeling and Design (IJISMD), 1(1):1-32, January-March 2010.
[3] Extending Enterprise Architecture Modeling with Business Goals and Requirements, W. Engelsman, D.A.C. Quartel, H. Jonkers, M.J. van Sinderen, Enterprise Information Systems, 5(1):9-36, 2011.
[4] TOGAF® Version 9.2, The Open Group Standard (C182), April 2018, published by The Open Group; refer to: www.opengroup.org/library/c182.
[5] Extending and Formalizing the Framework for Information Systems Architecture, J.F. Sowa, J.A. Zachman, IBM Systems Journal, Volume 31, No. 3, pp.590-616, 1992.
[6] TOGAF® Framework and ArchiMate® Modeling Language Harmonization: A Practitioner’s Guide to Using the TOGAF® Framework and the ArchiMate® Language, White Paper (W14C), December 2014, published by The Open Group; refer to: www.opengroup.org/library/w14c.
[7] Unified Modeling Language®: Superstructure, Version 2.0 (formal/05-07-04), Object Management Group, August 2005.
[8] Unified Modeling Language®: Infrastructure, Version 2.4.1 (formal/201-08-05), Object Management Group, August 2011.
[9] A Business Process Design Language, H. Eertink, W. Janssen, P. Oude Luttighuis, W. Teeuw, C. Vissers, in Proceedings of the First World Congress on Formal Methods, Toulouse, France, September 1999.
[10] Enterprise Business Architecture: The Formal Link Between Strategy and Results, R. Whittle, C.B. Myrick, CRC Press, 2004.
[11] Composition of Relations in Enterprise Architecture, R. van Buuren, H. Jonkers, M.E. Iacob, P. Strating, in Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Graph Transformation, pp.39-53, edited by H. Ehrig et al., Rome, Italy, 2004.
[12] Business Process Modeling Notation™ (BPMN™), Version 2.0 (formal/2011-01-03), Object Management Group, 2011.
[13] Performance and Cost Analysis of Service-Oriented Enterprise Architectures, H. Jonkers, M.E. Iacob, in Global Implications of Modern Enterprise Information Systems: Technologies and Applications, edited by A. Gunasekaran, IGI Global, 2009.
[14] ISO/IEC 42010:2011, Systems and Software Engineering – Recommended Practice for Architectural Description of Software-Intensive Systems, Edition 1.
[15] Business Motivation Model™ (BMM™), Version 1.1 (formal/2010-05-01), Object Management Group, 2010.
[16] Using the ArchiMate® Language with UML®, White Paper (W134), September 2013, published by The Open Group; refer to: www.opengroup.org/library/w134.
[17] TOGAF® Series Guide: Value Streams (G178), October 2017, published by The Open Group: refer to: www.opengroup.org/library/g178.
[18] Business Architecture Guild. A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge® (BIZBOK® Guide), Version 7.0, 2018; refer to: www.businessarchitectureguild.org.
[19] TOGAF® Series Guide: The TOGAF® Technical Reference Model (TRM) (G175), September 2017, published by The Open Group: refer to: www.opengroup.org/library/g175.
[20] ArchiMate® Model Exchange File Format for the ArchiMate Modeling Language, Version 3.0, The Open Group Standard (C174), May 2017, published by The Open Group; refer to: www.opengroup.org/library/c174.
1 Introduction
1.1 Objective
This standard is the specification of the ArchiMate Enterprise Architecture modeling language, a visual language with a set of default iconography for describing, analyzing, and communicating many concerns of Enterprise Architectures as they change over time. The standard provides a set of entities and relationships with their corresponding iconography for the representation of Architecture Descriptions. The ArchiMate ecosystem also supports an exchange format in XML which allows model and diagram exchange between tools [20].
1.2 Overview
An Enterprise Architecture is typically developed because key people have concerns that need to be addressed by the business and IT systems within an organization. Such people are commonly referred to as the “stakeholders” of the Enterprise Architecture. The role of the architect is to address these concerns by identifying and refining the motivation and strategy expressed by stakeholders, developing an architecture, and creating views of the architecture that show how it addresses and balances stakeholder concerns. Without an Enterprise Architecture, it is unlikely that all concerns and requirements are considered and addressed.
The ArchiMate Enterprise Architecture modeling language provides a uniform representation for diagrams that describe Enterprise Architectures. It includes concepts for specifying inter-related architectures, specific viewpoints for selected stakeholders, and language customization mechanisms. It offers an integrated architectural approach that describes and visualizes different architecture domains and their underlying relations and dependencies. Its language framework provides a structuring mechanism for architecture domains, layers, and aspects. It distinguishes between the model elements and their notation, to allow for varied, stakeholder-oriented depictions of architecture information. The language uses service-orientation to distinguish and relate the Business, Application, and Technology Layers of Enterprise Architectures, and uses realization relationships to relate concrete elements to more abstract elements across these layers.
1.3 Conformance
The ArchiMate language may be implemented in software used for Enterprise Architecture modeling. For the purposes of this standard, the conformance requirements for implementations of the language given in this section apply. A conforming implementation:
1. Shall support the language structure, generic metamodel, relationships, layers, cross-layer dependencies, and other elements as specified in Chapters 3, 4, 5,