A Survey of Enterprise Architecture Analysis Using Multi Criteria Decision Making Models (MCDM)

System design becomes really important for software production due to continuous increase in size and complexity of software systems. It is a complex design activity to build architecture for the systems like large enterprises. Thus it is a critical issue to select the correct architecture in software engineering domain. Moreover, in enterprise architecture selection different goals and objectives must be taken into consideration as it is a multi-criteria decision making problem. Generally this field of enterprise architecture analysis has progressed from the application of linear weighting, through integer programming and linear programming to multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) models. In this paper we survey two multi-criteria decision making models (AHP, ANP) to determine that to what extent they have been used in making powerful decisions in complex enterprise architecture analysis. We have found that by using ANP model, decision makers of an enterprise can make more precise and suitable decisions in selection of enterprise architecture styles.