Charterion™ — Agentic Enterprise Architecture Framework

Charterion™ is a formal, continuous and verifiable Enterprise Architecture framework for organisations in which autonomous software agents act under authority conferred by the organisation.

It proposes a shift from enterprise architecture as a primarily human-consumed descriptive model to enterprise architecture as a formally analysable, machine-consumable authority substrate. In Charterion, autonomous agents are represented as enterprise principals; their authority is anchored in business capabilities, processes and steps, formally derived into technical resource needs and entitlements, traceable to accountable humans, and analysable before deployment.

The framework integrates five central contributions: enterprise architecture as an authority substrate; business-scoped authority formally derived into technical entitlements; a formal semantics for agent authority within the enterprise metamodel; design–run-time–boundary coherence; and machine-addressed architecture with explicit epistemic warrant.

Charterion provides a content metamodel and formal semantics, an Agency Layer, an execution substrate with a four-valued admissibility function, a Boundary Plane for inter-organisational agent interactions, a continuous architecture method, a governance model, machine-checkable well-formedness and coherence conditions, artefacts and viewpoints, a model exchange format, conformance and maturity models, and worked cases across five sectors.

Version 1.1 extends Version 1.0 with optional profiles covering configuration currency (WF13), chartered instantiation (WF14), staffed reservation (WF15), bounded capability composition (WF16), grounded obligations (WF17), delegation perimeter (WF18), and bounded blast radius (WF19), together with Authority Certificates and the CC7 cross-plane coherence condition.

Version 1.1 also strengthens the framework's validation and positioning through a controlled injection study, mechanical regression against Version 1.0, computed regulatory evidence, protocol bindings, a comparative replication protocol based on primary sources, and an explicit field-study protocol.

The framework is designed to coexist with established Enterprise Architecture practices. It includes an ArchiMate 3.2 specialisation profile and a mapping to the TOGAF Architecture Development Method.

The current evidence is analytical, experimental on synthetic models, and demonstrative through worked cases. Naturalistic validation in operational organisations remains future work. Charterion is therefore presented as a candidate next-generation Enterprise Architecture paradigm rather than as an empirically established replacement for existing EA frameworks.