OV-6a specifies the operational or business rules that are constraints to an enterprise, a mission, operation, business, or an architecture. While other OV models (OV-1, OV-2, and OV-5) describe the structure of a business (what the business can do, for the most part) they do not describe what the business must do, or what it cannot do.

Rules are modeled in relation to the constraining objects. A constraint can be potentially linked to any object of the architecture. This is done within the different diagrams showing the objects to be constrained or by adding new constraints via the property pages.

Constraints retrieved from a deep exploration of the architecture are displayed in the DoDAF 2.0 navigation tree and start page. You can also create constraints from these locations. The constraints displayed are those attached to the operational items of the architecture.