Automated Synchronization of Enterprise Architecture Models with Deployment Models

Architects in organizations are often tasked with aligning technical solutions with the business strategy. However, as this involves various organizational departments using different tools, technologies, or modeling languages, this requires continuous effort and carries the risk that business and IT departments become misaligned. This is especially the case for synchronizing enterprise architecture models with deployment models, as both describe the organization's IT landscape but are at different abstraction levels. To address this problem, we want to research how an automated approach can support architects in an organization in synchronizing the enterprise architecture models with the deployment models. For this, we develop a method that uses model transformation techniques to transform deployment models into enterprise architecture models and vice versa. We expect that the automated approach will lead to more consistency between enterprise architecture models and deployment models and reduce the architects' effort to keep the models synchronized. We plan to evaluate the approach with a set of case studies and user studies.