Rule-Based Architectural Compliance Checks for Enterprise Architecture Management

Modern enterprise application systems are parts of complex IT landscapes. The architecture of such a landscape may impose constraints upon the design of single applications, for example by the mandatory use of enterprise wide reference architectures. It is of great importance for the sake of smooth operation and easy maintaining that single applications are compliant to the reference architectures. Checking this compliance is highly important for the architecture management to assure the quality of application systems. Unfortunately, current tool support is not flexible enough to easily check different aspects of architectural compliance. This paper proposes a rule based approach based upon logic programming concepts towards a formalism for architectural compliance checking. In this approach, the architecture and design are represented as logical knowledge base that can be queried for architectural compliance. Furthermore, the paper presents a case study, in which the approach was prototypically implemented and applied in an industrial context.