Introduction and Usage of the Business Objects for Architectures

Introduction and Usage of the Business Objects for Architectures

An Architecture can be thought of as a bucket in which things are included.

Architecture - a bucket in which things are included

SysML diagram

Page currently under construction

Architecture Principles

This section introduces how the architecture business objects are used to represent the main principles of architectures:

• Architecture Definition.

  • Architecture Derivation.
  • Architecture as the context.

Architecture Definition

An architecture is defined by:

• Identifying that the Architecture is “of” something.(Shown orange in image below).

  • These can be high level objects like Product Concepts or Product Configurations (e.g. A380) or they can be architectures of breakdown elements (e.g. a sub component like an engine ). If the breakdown element is in a breakdown that is included in the architecture, then fractal architectures can be achieved.

  • Identifying what is included in the architecture. (Shown cyan in image below).

    • Documents

      • The most basic form - when the architecture is an idea

    • Requirement satisfaction (BDARequirementShouldBeSatisfied)

      • e.g. something should satisfy a requirement in the context of the architecture

    • Breakdowns

      • e.g. Functional/System/Zonal/Physical/…

    • Allocations between breakdowns (BDABreakdownElementAssociation)

      • e.g. allocation of function to logical element in context of an architecture

    • Representations of elements (BDABreakdownElementRealizationAssociation)

      • e.g. model of something in the context of an architecture

  • All of the above can have justifications and assumptions associated to capture the rationale for the architecture

The Business objects are shown in the image below

Architecture Definition business objects

Architecture Derivation

Given an Architecture Definition it is then possible to derive more information concerning the architecture.

This can be added by declaring that a new breakdown is of the architecture.

Page currently under construction

Architecture as the context

Given an Architecture Definition (bucket contents) it is then possible to use this as an input to a study for e.g.

• Analysis of the architecture as a whole

  • Analysis of elements in the architecture

Page currently under construction

Either on set up of the study, or during generation of the model results, the association of models to the architecture can be include as described in Architecture Derivation above.

Section author: Judith Crockford