Organizations are increasingly faced with the challenge of architecting complex systems that must operate within a System of Systems context. While network science has offered usefully clear insights into product and system architectures, we seek to extend these approaches to evaluate enterprise system architectures. Here, we explore the application of graph‐theoretic methods to the analysis of two real‐world enterprise architectures (a military communications system and a search and rescue system) and to assess the relative importance of different architecture components. For both architectures, different topological measures of component significance identify differing network vertices as important. From this, we identify several significant challenges a system architect needs to be cognisant of when employing graph‐theoretic approaches to evaluate architectures; finding suitable abstractions of heterogeneous architectural elements and distinguishing between network‐structural properties and system‐functional properties. These challenges are summarized as five guiding principles for utilizing network science concepts for enterprise architecture evaluation.

中文翻译：

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从网络角度评估系统架构：基础和挑战

组织越来越面临设计必须在System of System上下文中运行的复杂系统的挑战。尽管网络科学提供了对产品和系统体系结构的有用而清晰的见解，但我们试图将这些方法扩展到评估企业系统体系结构。在这里，我们探索了图论方法在两种现实企业架构（军事通信系统和搜救系统）分析中的应用，并评估了不同架构组件的相对重要性。对于这两种架构，组件重要性的不同拓扑度量将不同的网络顶点标识为重要的。由此，我们发现使用图论方法评估体系结构时，系统架构师需要意识到的几个重大挑战；查找异构架构元素的合适抽象，并区分网络结构属性和系统功能属性。将这些挑战概括为利用网络科学概念进行企业体系结构评估的五项指导原则。