The research paper deals with the ISO 14001 standard to integrate and improve the operation of environmental management systems (EMS), which are currently being actively adopted or maintained by companies worldwide. Utilizing EMS is either due to internal factors or external pressures, with the prevailing reason of customer, community, and company image. For easing the use of the EMS, a metamodel based on the ArchiMate language is developed. ArchiMate is a widely accepted open standard designed to model enterprise architecture. ArchiMate facilitates holistic, structured understanding and enables communication about the enterprise and its parts between different stakeholders. The contribution of this paper lies in: Firstly, the creation of an ISO 14001 metamodel based on the UML (Unified Modeling Language) domain diagram. Secondly, model mapping between this UML metamodel and the resulting ArchiMate metamodel. Finally, the resulting metamodel is ready to be used by enterprises in practice. Moreover, the metamodel could be further modified and enhanced for, e.g., domain-specific industries. ISO 14001, ArchiMate, environmental management system, mapping, metamodeling standards range from general information to specific areas such as material flow cost accounting in organizations or further specified in supply chains [3].
Being green is perceived very sensitively today, especially in Western society. Until recently, the
European Union has been preparing and further approved a green deal, which is supposed to restrict
significantly non-green companies [
One way to show (and be environmentally responsible) is to implement the corresponding standard of the Environmental management systems (EMS).
ISO 14000 family of environmental management systems consists currently of ten published
2022 Copyright for this paper by its authors.
However, adopting and maintaining functional EMS could prove to be a difficult task as the
communication between different stakeholders and the measurable way to defend the financial benefits
of the EMS financially is one of the main barriers [
This paper focuses on the ISO 14001:2015 Environmental management systems — Requirements with guidance for use (for short ISO 14001, standard or just ISO) that defines the scope of the EMS in an organization and provides definitions for terms, critical processes for the successful implementation of the EMS, and techniques. For further information on the standard see chapter 2.1.
This section discusses the background of this work. First, the ISO 14001 standard is introduced. Then, the language of ArchiMate is described. Next, attention is paid to similar works creating metamodels. From here, the methodology of this paper follows. 2.1.
ISO 14001 standard from the year 2015 standard is a successor to the prior version published in 2005. The current standard consists of main eleven chapters: • Chapter 0 – Introduction • Chapter 6 – Planning • Chapter 1 – Scope • Chapter 7 – Support • Chapter 2 – Normative references • Chapter 8 – Operation • Chapter 3 – Terms and definitions • Chapter 9 – Performance evaluation • Chapter 4 – Context of an organization • Chapter 10 – Improvement • Chapter 5 – Leadership
For mapping purposes and understanding of the concepts, chapter 0, chapter 3, and chapter 4 of the ISO standard should be highlighted. The standard itself builds upon the PDCA (Plan – Do – Check – Act) methodology, fig. 1. See that the chapters of the standard align with this proposition. 2.2.
The ArchiMate language is an open standard that aims to ease the process of managing enterprise
assets to increase the effectiveness of an organization [
The ArchiMate language is quite a new language in comparison to the Unified Modelling Language
(UML) or the Entity-Relationship Diagram (ERD), which was in the modern form already published in
Chen’s work in 1976 [
The process of creating the ArchiMate metamodel is separated into multiple steps. Firstly a UML
domain metamodel is developed. After that, this model is inspected by the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW)
model [
The BWW model or, more specifically, BWW ontology is a systematic approach to combat
conceptual modeling problems. It is a way to achieve correspondence between the conceptual
models/elements used and what the model is about. The adoption of the notions of Bunge enriched the
work of the Wand and Weber duo. They developed an ontology with a vision to build the foundation
for information systems modeling. As such, this ontological model of information systems, the BWW
model, could be used to analyze and evaluate the (UML) and its domain-specifics [
A bilingual version of the ISO 14001 standard was used to increase the mapping accuracy. The
second language is the author's native language (English/Czech). ArchiMate was used in the original
English version, with a translated dictionary of terms available in Czech (the standard itself is not
translated into Czech). This paper is inspired by Buchalcevova and her work [
Since the ISO 14001 standard does not contain any metamodel, the UML metamodel was created. In particular, the definitions section (chapter) three was used to create the UML domain metamodel. However, during the process, those concepts that did not have a definition were analyzed, and these were added to the metamodel due to their importance. Furthermore, there was then an overload between elements and binding for the concept of outsourcing. Last but not least, the concept of external organization emerged out of scope (fig. 4).
The UML metamodel consists of 39 elements, from which five are newly added, one is heavily
overloaded, and one is out of the scope of the EMS, but its processes that are outsourced from the
organizations are not. For that reason, the external organization is kept in the metamodel. This external
organization also corresponds with the term “extended enterprise” in the TOGAF (The Open Group
Architecture Framework) [
ArchiMate element name grouping grouping course of action business actor business actor business actor grouping grouping assessment outcome goal goal function requirement requirement assessment assessment capability business object
XOR business object AND data object AND artifact value stream process
OR relationship, see below process process assessment assessment course of action course of action
outcome assessment process process assessment assessment
Due the addition of the other concepts, a second table (tab. 2) is provided in the same way with the additional mapping.
The visual representation of the elements can be seen in fig 5. The elements are grouped into corresponding groups of the ISO 14001 standard: • Organization and leadership • Planning • Support and Operation • Performance Evaluating and Improvement
With the finalized mapping, the ArchiMate metamodel of the ISO 14001 is developed (fig. 6). As can be seen, the elements span mainly the strategic and business layers and the motivational aspect. The spatial orientation and position mimic the original UML metamodel, with little changes in the top and the bottom parts of element positioning for a more compact look. Also, the System, Documentation and Records elements and inner grouping of Activities, products, or services are being intentionally omitted. Their addition would visually clutter the presented metamodel in this paper.
If needed, the metamodel could be easily graphically re-orientated. This ability also follows the best practice of enterprise architecture modeling. The rearrangement is helpful because each stakeholder has different concerns; therefore, architects use different viewpoints and corresponding views in practice. The presented layout should be seen as just one of the metamodel graph configurations. The metamodel is then potentially used as an accelerator for the corresponding enterprise architecture's tasks.
This paper introduced a metamodel for ISO 140001 in the ArchiMate language. The metamodel development took multiple steps starting by creating a domain model in the UML standard. Subsequently, this model was reviewed according to the BWW model. The mapping of UML elements to ArchiMate was then proposed, followed by converting the individual relationships resulting into finalized ArchiMate metamodel.
Although the model is thus verified from a theoretical point of view, it seems more than appropriate to validate this metamodel in practice by ArchiMate language experts and actual users of the ISO 14001 standard who exercise the EMS (in the optimal case, the expert should fulfill both of these criteria. Presented metamodel can be further improved by creating specific viewpoints (a technique in the ArchiMate standard). Also, further exploration of practical usage could be a foundation for developing domain-specific metamodels.
I want to thank Radvan Nováček, Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic, and Lukáš Slavík, Ministry of the Interior of the Czech Republic, for sharing their ideas and consulting the earlier versions of the manuscript. Although, any errors potentially present in the manuscript are solely my own and should not tarnish the reputations of these esteemed enterprise architects.