Ontological Analysis and Redesign of Risk Modeling in ArchiMate

Risk analysis is a complex and critical activity in various contexts, ranging from strategic planning to IT systems operation. Given its complexity, several Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks and modeling languages have been developed to help analysts in representing and analyzing risks. Yet, the notion of risk remains overloaded and conceptually unclear in most of them. In this paper, we investigate the real-world semantics underlying risk-related constructs in one of such approaches, namely ArchiMate's Risk and Security Overlay (RSO). We perform this investigation by means of ontological analysis to reveal semantic limitations in the overlay, such as ambiguity and missing constructs. Building on the results of this analysis, we propose a well-founded redesign of the risk modeling aspects of the RSO.