Guidelines for UML or SysML modelling within an enterprise architecture

Abstract: Enterprise Architectures (EA) are used to describe an enterprise’s structure in a standardized way. An Enterprise Architecture also provides decision-support when choosing a direction or making changes at different levels of an enterprise, such as the business architecture or technology architecture level. This can involve decisions such as: What kind of enterprise should this be, what kind of technologies should be used for new system developments etcetera. Therefore, using the Unified Modelling Language (UML) or Systems Modelling Language (SysML) together with standardized guidelines that help you decide what to do before, during, and after modelling could be important for producing correct and useful system models, which later on will be used to develop actual systems. At the moment, standardized guidelines of this kind do not really exist. However, there are a lot of information about why you should use UML or SysML, what kinds of UML or SysML diagrams that exist, or what notations to follow when creating a specific UML or SysML diagram. In this thesis, the objective has been to research about the usefulness and creation of standardized guidelines for UML or SysML modelling in an Enterprise Architecture (i.e. mainly intended for the automotive industry domain). For this reason, the two research questions: “how can you create useful standardized guidelines for UML or SysML modelling?” and “what do useful standardized guidelines for UML or SysML modelling look like?” were chosen. A case study was performed on a real-life project at the company Volvo Construction Equipment, which resulted in the two research questions being answered. Firstly, a three-step method (i.e. create guidelines – test guidelines – improve guidelines) was proven to create useful standardized guidelines. Secondly, useful standardized guidelines were created from this three-step method. Hopefully, these created standardized guidelines can be used by the targeted companies right away to make their modelling work more efficient, or serve as a foundation when creating their own standardized guidelines later on.