The purpose of the Business Deployment Model is to capture the physical partitioning and distribution of the business. These could be geographical locations and their characteristics, the communication channels between them and their properties or other physical resources.

The representation of the Business Deployment Model could be done at different levels of abstraction. The Locality Model represents the initial, abstract decomposition into physical elements. A locality expresses notionally where the business takes place without defining the exact geographic location. Depending on the scope of business modeling, these localities might be decomposed into finer-grained localities. As decisions are taken, the model evolves into a more "concrete" one, capturing the different characteristics of each physical resource.

The Business Deployment Model is also representing the mapping of the business subsytems operations (grouped around interfaces) to localities. This determines the resource requirements for each locality. Based on the behavior to be supported at the localities, collaborations of localities can be constructed (and represented in interaction diagrams). These help characterize the connections between the localities.

Each locality in the System Deployment Model has an attached description of derived business supplementary requirements (derived from business supplementary specifications) which specify quality (reliability, performance, scalability, usability and so forth), physical, political and environmental requirements, and other constraints (cost, risk, and so forth). From these requirements, the actual characteristics (of each locality) are determined; obviously, these are chosen to meet the explicit requirements at least, but can exceed the requirements (for example, to cope with unexpected capacity demands).