Enterprise architecture

With the software specification, an overview of the functionalities of Luxon is given. This is what the users sees and what it interacts with. However, to describe the interactions and relationships between the different components that make up the total system of Luxon (front-end and back-end), an architectural model is needed in the form of an enterprise architecture. To indicate what this architectural model exactly is, the definition of an enterprise architecture needs to be stated. Enterprise architecture is the fundamental organization of a system, embodied in its components, their relationships to each other and the environment, and the principles governing its design and evolution (Winter and Fischer, 2006). Enterprise architecture provides an architecture in which every component of a corporation is modelled together with the relationships between them and the environment. These components represent customers, staff, stakeholders, processes, assets, products, services, data, information, communication and security (Hewlett, 2006). It provides a blue print for a corporation. Being that it is a blue print, the individual components are not discussed in great detail. This would make the overview in general less clear.

Application Features

Usage Last Month & CO2 Usage

Easy accessible & understandable energy performance data Benchmark/comparison function (within and between locations) Long term data storage

Reports Energy management reports

Table 6: Applications and features of Luxon Maintenance Assist Figure 14: Visual design of the Luxon Energy Analytics module

16

In this research, a view on this enterprise architecture is designed so that only the relevant components that have value for Luxon are being modelled. With this architecture, everything that is a part of Luxon is modelled and the opportunities and new functionalities found in this research can be designed in a detailed way. By doing this, Nedap knows not only how the new functionalities will look and interact with the customer, but also what other components need to be used/altered/created in order to deliver these new functionalities.

3.2.1 The value of an enterprise architecture

With an enterprise architecture, it is possible to create an overview of a product or company to see what components it is made out off and how they interact. Where the software architecture specifies in great detail what one component of a product is and how it works, the enterprise architecture provides a helicopter view of all the different components that make up the entire product combined and it shows how they interact. In summary, an enterprise architecture provides the corporation with the following advantages (Hewlett, 2006):

1. To present an overview of all components of a company.

2. To present the current and future vision of the business.

3. To support quality decision making (investment choices) and the impact of changes.

4. To use information technology to support business operations in a cost-effective manner.

5. Leverage new technology solutions effectively by the ability to quickly assess what is necessary to implement them.

6. Promote the sharing of systems and data.

7. Improve ability to integrate data across the company.

Advantage 1,2,3 and 5 are particularly important in this research as they provide the tools to indicate what is necessary to implement the new functionalities.

3.2.1 The Archimate language

The enterprise architecture modelling language called Archimate is used to design the enterprise architecture of the current version of Luxon. Archimate provides a graphical language that can be used for the representation of enterprise architectures. Archimate is a lightweight and scalable language in several aspects (The Open Group, 2015):

 Its architecture framework is simple but comprehensive enough to provide a good structuring mechanism for architecture domains, layers and aspects.

 The language incorporates the concepts of the “service orientation” paradigm that promotes a new organizing principle in terms of (business, application and infrastructure) services for organizations, with far-reaching consequences for their enterprise architecture. This is a very important aspect of Archimate as we know that light management is an important service in the servitized lighting industry. It is thus very valuable to be able to implement the service aspect in this architecture.

17

The Archimate language exists of an architectural framework of 9 cells in a 3 by 3 grid. The framework can be seen in figure 15.

As can be seen, the framework consists of three layers:

 Business layer. This layer offers products and services to external customers, which are realized in the organization by business processes performed by business actors. More on business processes and business actors in appendix B.

 Applications layer. This layer supports the business layer with application services. These services are realized by (software) application.

 Technology layer. This layer offers infrastructure services (such as processing, storage and communication services) needed to run applications. These services are realized by computer and communication hardware and software.

In this language, services are described as the following: a unit of functionality that a system exposes to its environment, which provides a certain value (monetary or otherwise). It does this while hiding internal operations.

Each of the three layers consists of aspects. Although these aspects aren’t explicitly mentioned in the architecture, it important to know of their existence as they talk about the nature of the concepts:

 Active structure. Concepts being defined as elements that can perform behaviour (such as business actors, applications components and devices that display behaviour).

 Behaviour. Simply represents behaviour that is performed by an actor. Behavioural concepts are assigned to structural concepts so that it is clear who actually displays the behaviour.

 Passive structure. This aspect represents the objects on which behaviour is performed.