An OV-5 should consist of a well formed, balanced, and consistent set of activities, their sub-activities and the various inputs and outputs.
An OV-5 follows some of the FIPS 183 IDEF0 conventions (parent/ child activity decomposition hierarchy) but does not adhere to all of the IDEF0 conventions. This is because some conventions are incompatible with building integrated architectures and that takes precedence.
For example, in an OV-5, while mechanism arrows and control arrows are normal parts of IDEF0, they are not used in OV-5 diagrams. This does not mean that they are not identified. For mechanism arrows, a different approach has been implemented based on the three-way association between Activities, Nodes, and Roles. For Control Arrows, there is an association between Activities (System Functions) and Standards and Guidance that eliminates Control arrows from OV-5 diagrams. Again, the consistency of building integrated architectures takes precedence and is more important.
Note Mechanism and Control arrows have not been removed from OV-5 diagrams and the user is still free to use them if so desired for visual purposes. However, the only way to form the DoDAF integrated architecture associations is through the matrix editor associations.
While outputs being looped back as controls to other activities are a normal part of the IDEF0 methodology, they cannot be used to build Information Exchanges unless they are brought back as Inputs. Thus, Information Exchanges will not be formed when an output arrow loops back as a control to another activity (the figure on the left) but will be formed when looped back as an Input (the figure on the right).
