A federated approach to develop enterprise interoperability

Abstract

Interoperability is one of the requisite features for existing enterprises in the increasing competitive and complex global market. In the last decade, enterprise interoperability has been developed and prescribed by various kinds of frameworks, methods, and techniques. However interoperability development is still not mature enough to become a science. Meanwhile, it keeps evolving according to different business requirement and market environment. Nowadays, networked environment causes unpredictable dynamical situations, thus sustainable interoperability becomes a new research dimension in the interoperability of enterprise systems and applications domain. In the sustainable interoperability, enterprise interoperability dynamics is one of the focal topics. This dynamic approach also called federated is originated from Enterprise Interoperability Framework of INTEROP NoE, which aims to establish interoperability on the fly. This paper presents current state on federated approaches to develop enterprise interoperability dynamics. Based on this study, a novel Federated interoperability approach is proposed. It aims at bridging the gap from interoperability concepts to the implementation of interoperable enterprise information systems development. This approach reuses distributed simulation interoperability concepts to facilitate and coordinate the communication between heterogeneous distributed information systems of the enterprises. This simulation part has been implemented into a software platform. This platform is complaint with the latest version of the high level architecture that is a distributed communication standard. This approach also proposes a development lifecycle that intends to reuse existing information systems without recoding them but by adapting them to the new requirements of interoperability dynamics.