Wehling, KennySchaefer, InaEibl, MaximilianGaedke, Martin2017-08-282017-08-282017978-3-88579-669-5Over the course of time, IT architectures in business environments grow and often include a range of different architectural variants. This causes various redundancies and a high level of IT complexity leading to higher costs and increased effort for evolving and maintaining the entire IT landscape. In this paper, we propose a concept for a rule based system that analyzes the variability within IT architectures automatically and supports experts in identifying and reducing the architecture’s complexity by eliminating unnecessary architectural variants.enIT architectureunnecessary IT complexityunnecessary variabilityexpert system10.18420/in2017_1521617-5468