HLA supported, federation oriented enterprise interoperability, application to aerospace enterprises

Abstract

The field of research, which address distributed enterprises interoperability implementation with HLA (High Level Architecture), was initiated in the final report on future trends of INTEROP Network of Excellence [1]. This report presents fields of investigation to support large federation oriented enterprise interoperability and state the requirement of interoperability transition from concepts to implementation.In this paper, we present, in a first point, the enterprise modeling and the enterprise interoperability concepts. A unifying three dimensional framework has been proposed in [2] for enterprise interoperability to represent the ability of interactions between enterprise systems. In this approach, the interoperability is considered as significant if the interactions can take place at least at the three different levels of conceptual abstraction and if interoperability barriers can be bridged. Then, an interoperability approach can be proposed considering the degree of integration between the different enterprises.After that, we give a review of ongoing researches using HLA to support enterprise interoperability execution. Indeed, the HLA standard, initially designed for military M&S purpose, can be transposed for enterprise interoperability at the implementation level, reusing the years of experiences in distributed systems.Then, we conclude the state of the art part by presenting MDA (Model Driven Architecture) methodology that assists the transformation of enterprise models from conceptual level to models for execution or simulation and the emerging MDI (Model Driven Interoperability) methodology for considering the interoperability transformation.We have recalled complementary levels of abstraction to describe enterprise models and a methodology to transform them, but there is no completed methodology for distributed Enterprise modeling, addressing interoperability consideration at each level. From that postulate, we propose to rationalize the development lifecycle of distributed enterprise models by merging the HLA FEDEP and the MDA/MDI methodology to a new unified lifecycle that will guide the development of distributed enterprises models from the conceptual level to the implementation of a solution.We finish by illustrating interoperability problem on the complex problem of aerospace international cooperation.