The discipline of enterprise architecture (EA) is an established approach to model and manage the interaction of business processes and IT in an organization. Thereby, the EA model as a central artifact of EA is subject to a continuous evolution caused by multiple sources of changes. The continuous evolution requires a lot of effort in controlling and managing the evolution of the EA model. This is especially true when merging the induced changes from different sources in the EA model. Additionally, the lack of tool and automation support makes this a very time-consuming and error-prone task. The evolutionary character and the automated quality assessment of artifacts is a well-known challenge in the software development domain as well. To meet these challenges, the discipline of continuous delivery (CD) has emerged to be very useful. The evolution of EA model artifacts shows similarities to the evolution of software artifacts. Therefore, we leveraged practices of CD to practices of EA maintenance. Thus, we created a conceptual framework for automated EA model maintenance. The concepts were realized in a first prototype and were evaluated in a fictitious case study against equivalence classes based on EA model metrics and a set of several requirements for automated EA model maintenance from research. Overall, the concepts prove to be a promising basis for further refinement, implementation, and evaluation in research in an industrial context.

企业体系结构（EA）学科是一种建立模型并管理组织中业务流程与IT交互的方法。因此，作为EA核心工件的EA模型会受到多种变化源引起的持续发展的影响。持续发展需要大量精力来控制和管理EA模型的发展。当合并来自EA模型中不同来源的诱发变化时，尤其如此。此外，由于缺少工具和自动化支持，因此这是一项非常耗时且容易出错的任务。工件的进化特征和自动质量评估也是软件开发领域中的众所周知的挑战。为了应对这些挑战，连续交付（CD）准则已显得非常有用。EA模型工件的演变显示出与软件工件的演变相似。因此，我们将CD的实践运用到EA维护的实践中。因此，我们创建了一个用于自动EA模型维护的概念框架。这些概念是在第一个原型中实现的，并在基于EA模型指标的虚拟案例研究中根据等效类进行了评估，并根据研究提出了一些对自动EA模型维护的若干要求。总体而言，这些概念被证明是在工业环境中进一步完善，实施和评估研究的有希望的基础。这些概念是在第一个原型中实现的，并在基于EA模型指标的虚拟案例研究中根据等效类进行了评估，并根据研究提出了一些对自动EA模型维护的若干要求。总体而言，这些概念被证明是在工业环境中进一步完善，实施和评估研究的有希望的基础。这些概念是在第一个原型中实现的，并在基于EA模型指标的虚拟案例研究中根据等效类进行了评估，并根据研究提出了一些对自动EA模型维护的若干要求。总体而言，这些概念被证明是在工业环境中进一步完善，实施和评估研究的有希望的基础。