DoDAF

The Department of Defense Architecture Framework (DoDAF) defines how to organize the specification of enterprise architectures for U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) applications. All major DoD weapons and information technology system procurements are required to document their enterprise architectures using the view products prescribed by the DoDAF. DoDAF is well suited to large systems and systems-of-systems (SoSs) with complex integration and interoperability issues. Although DoDAF is primarily focused on defense applications, it can also be applied to commercial systems.

DoDAF Overview
DoDAF is administered by the U. S. Undersecretary of Defense for Business Transformation’s DoDAF Working Group. It was formerly named C4ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance) Architecture Framework. Other derivative frameworks based on DoDAF include the Ministry of Defence (United Kingdom) Architecture Framework (MODAF), and the NATO Architecture Framework (NAF).

 DoDAF organizes enterprise architectures into four basic view sets:

  • All View (AV) with two work products;
  • Operational View (OV) with seven work products;
  • Systems View (SV) with 11 work products;
  • Technical Standards View (TV) with two work products.

In practice, most systems only use a subset of the DoDAF view products to specify their system architectures. Like other architecture framework approaches (e.g., TOGAF), DoDAF also defines a data repository for holding its work products. The DoDAF repository is called the Core Architecture Data Model (CADM).

DoDAF Specifications

The most recent version of the DoDAF specification is DoDAF v. 1.5, which consists of three volumes, and was published in April 2007.

DoDAF Examples: UML/SysML

You can find DoDAF specification examples that use UML/SysML as the architecture description language in the following resources:

  • DoDAF 1.5 Volume II – UML representations for all Operational and System View products are shown throughout this volume. Note that this DoDAF update has not yet been reconciled with UPDM (see below).
  • “Modeling DoDAF Compliant Architectures with UML 2,” by Cris Kobryn and Chris Sibbald, white paper, May 2004. Although now outdated due to recent changes in both DoDAF and UPDM, this influential white paper was one of the first to clarify the mapping between UML 2.x diagrams and DoDAF product views.
  • see also: UPDM UML/SysML Examples on UPDM page of this web, which are also DoDAF compliant.

DoDAF Examples: IDEF0/IDEF1

You can find DoDAF specification examples that use IDEF0/IDEF1 as the architecture description language in the following resources:

  • “Modeling and Simulation for Architecture Assessment,” by Alexander Levis, presentation for Headquarters U.S. Air Force, 20 April 2004. Shows how to specify the Operational Views for an Air Intruder example using IDEF0 and IDEF1 to define the OV products.

DoDAF Tools

The following is a selected list of modeling tools that support specifying DoDAF-compliant architectures: