Using Model Transformation for Generating Visualizations from Repository Contents

Documenting application landscapes, a central part of Enterprise Architecture Management, heavily relies on graphical and intuitive visualizations. Planning, deciding, and controlling in respect to measures on the application landscape all benefit from such diagrams. In our research project Software Cartography we have analyzed a multitude of visualizations, originating from several major industrial users. Thereby, we found that the majority of diagrams used is created manually, a tendency we could confirm in a survey on Enterprise Architecture Management Tools. We regard the manual creation of these visualizations leading to significant disadvantages, mainly due to reasons of creation effort and modeling rigor. Therefore, we view the availability of an automatic process for generating well-formed diagrams as essential to Enterprise Architecture Management. This work presents an approach for leveraging model transformations to automatically generate graphical representations of application landscapes. An object oriented model for describing these visualizations is presented, which is augmented with formal definitions forming a basis for automated diagram layouting. We put this findings into practice and describe an exemplary layouting approach employing a genetic algorithm solving an optimization problem. Thus, we want to make a contribution to the visualization in Enterprise Architecture Management. c © TU München, sebis, 2006. All rights reserved. II