Collaboration support for executable enterprise architectures

Enterprise architecture development is inherently collaborative in nature, where members of the model development team share different perspectives and facets of the enterprise or system. In this paper, we describe an approach by which the executable content of enterprise architectures can be extracted from core enterprise architectural modeling languages (e.g., IDEF, UML) and be extended to develop abstractions of various discrete simulation paradigms such as Colored Petri nets, Monte Carlo, and Discrete Event Simulation. We also describe the use of representation structures at various levels of abstraction to enable collaboration by members of the systems modeling and simulation team in order to perform numerous verification and validation checks of the system or system-of-systems that is being modeled. Use of various levels of enterprise architecture abstractions facilitates not only model reuse but also collaborative effort within a team of diverse skills ranging from domain expertise, enterprise modeling, abstract and concrete simulation modeling, and design of experiments.