Standards Development

Scope

This document specifies the requirements for development and use of a reference architecture (RA), for a field of application, domain of activity or area of concern. An RA can apply to several kinds of entities, such as, enterprises, missions, organizations, systems, subsystems, components, processes, businesses, data, applications, information technologies, products, services, software items, hardware items, product lines, families of systems, systems of systems, collections of systems, and collections of applications.

This document specifies the requirements to be satisfied by a reference architecture description (RAD). An RAD captures common or generalized architectural information for a category of entities or for a field of application, a domain of activity or an area of concern.

This document is intended for:

— creators, owners and users of an RA and an RAD,

— creators and users of RA standards and specifications,

— organizations or individuals seeking improved communication through established RA vocabulary and concepts,

— organizations or individuals performing conformity assessments related to other RA standards and specifications,

— organizations or individuals that need to mandate the use of an RA,

— organizations or individuals developing a dictionary of entities, activities, actors and their relationships, and general definitions that feeds into the ontology for a particular domain,

— developers of methods, tools, technologies, training and education related to an RA.

The applicability of this document includes, but is not limited to, fields such as the following: artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), internet of things (IoT), cloud computing, cybersecurity, big data, smart cities, smart manufacturing, digital twins, telecommunications, aerospace, defence, banking, finance, insurance, energy, automotive, logistics, hospitality, healthcare, supply chains, transportation, manufacturing and production, agriculture and infrastructure.

This document offers guidance for architects developing or using an RA and its RAD that draws from various general purpose, architecture-specific standards such as ISO/IEC/IEEE 42024, 42010, 42020 and 42030 and related standards, such as ISO 15704, 19439 and 19440, ISO/IEC/IEEE 15288, 12207, 24748-1 and 24641 for enterprise, systems and software modelling, respectively.