Case study ArMiCo – Architecture migration concept
This solution helps to achieve shorter innovation cycles, ensure high system quality and guarantee long-term stability by providing a transparent overview of product interactions and identifying opportunities for reuse and unification.
The pervasive integration of information technology (IT) and operational technology (OT) in modern industrial systems requires a shift from product-oriented to holistic architecture management. To this end, fortiss and Endress+Hauser developed a lean, practice-oriented approach based on an ‘Architecture-as-Code’ model to holistically manage software and system architectures across multiple products.
Challenge
The seamless integration of OT with IT infrastructures, coupled with sophisticated software, creates complex applications that span multiple components and products. This extensive integration necessitates a paradigm shift in how we view and manage software and system architectures. Traditional approaches, confined to individual product boundaries, are no longer sufficient to ensure the agility, quality, and long-term stability required for sustained innovation and competitive advantage. Without a holistic view, organizations risk fragmented development, extended innovation cycles, and compromised system integrity.
Solution
The solution focuses on integrated system architecture and portfolio management. It offers a practical, streamlined approach designed to effectively manage and evolve complex, cross-product architectures. This is underpinned by a semantically rich ‘Architecture-as-Code’ model that captures both the functional and structural aspects of multiple software-intensive systems, thereby enabling the creation of comprehensive portfolio architectures. This facilitates the visualisation and management of cross-product functionalities arising from the interaction of multiple products within the context of a system-of-systems approach.
Building on the clearly defined semantics of these models, algorithms have been developed to automatically analyse, verify and validate portfolio architectures, thereby creating a robust foundation for the continuous development of highly integrated software and system landscapes. This foundation supports novel design, development and management processes, enables shorter innovation cycles, ensures sustainable system quality and long-term stability, and facilitates the continuous integration of stakeholders, roles and organisational units into modern standardisation and reuse processes.
Result
- Development of a structured Architecture-as-Code approach for describing and analyzing the portfolio architecture
- Holistic view on portfolio architecture across products
- Transparency of interplay between products that realize complex distributed functionalities
- Overview of the distribution of functionalities and potentials for unification and reuse
- Automated report on functional redundancies to outline reuse and unification potentials
Outcome
The project demonstrates that a semantically grounded ‘Architecture-as-Code’ approach makes the complexity of highly integrated IT and OT systems manageable and enables end-to-end transparency across product and system boundaries. This lays the foundations for more efficient development processes, greater reusability, and a system architecture that is stable and scalable in the long term.
Project partner
