Semantic Relations of Sub-Models in an Enterprise Model

Enterprise modeling is a set of tools, methods and practices for an aligned development of business, functional, organizational and technical aspects of an enterprise. Therefore, an enterprise model is always a set of sub-models of different semantics.In order to form a consistent enterprise model, its sub-models should be aligned to each other. The practice of modeling shows the difficulties in design of an aligned set of sub-models of an enterprise model. In this paper we present a review of enterprise modeling approaches aiming to find the reasons of difficulties. Our review shows that enterprise modeling approaches not sufficiently use the semantic relations of sub-models for building an enterprise model. This paper identifies and formalizes the semantic relations of sub-models and suggests to use them as constraints directing the design of aligned sub-models. The constraints imposed by sub-models of the enterprise model to each other are illustrated with a case study in ArchiMate