Understanding the Meta Model of the Carsharing Enterprise
To support a consistent and structured digital enterprise representation, we designed a domain-specific meta-model tailored to the needs of our Car Sharing case study. This meta-model defines the key elements, their attributes, and how they relate to one another — acting as the conceptual backbone for our enterprise architecture and the AI Assistant’s semantic understanding.
At the core of the model are key Archimate concepts such as Actors, Business Processes, Services, and Application Components. These are extended with specific entities like:
- Organizational Units (e.g., teams, departments, employees)
- Transformation Objectives and their derived Requirements
- Business Services, which are fulfilled by one or more Processes
- Systems and Application Components, capturing the IT layer
- Message Flows and Data Flows, to express interactions and information exchange
Each relationship is clearly defined. For example:
- A Business Service is fulfilled by one or more Processes
- A System may serve a Process or act as a target/source of Data Flows
- A Transformation Objective relates to specific Requirements, which in turn drive architectural change
The meta-model not only ensures structural clarity in the model but also enables downstream applications — such as AI-supported analysis and navigation — by providing a machine-readable and semantically rich foundation.
This abstraction layer is the key to interpreting enterprise architecture at scale and forms the basis of our digital twin approach.
