Interoperability: An Overview

Abstract

This paper presents an overview on the interoperability, specially between sensors, actuators and fieldbus. The reasons for non interoperability are analyzed. Two main problems are studied : how to build interoperable equipments ot systems, and how to test, to verify, or to prove the interoperability. The methods, the solutions, or the approaches, to build or to verify the interoperability are described. After some definitions pulled out of the standards or of testing organisations, the global interoperability is decomposed into four partial ones, which are relevant of services, of protocols aspects including the coding (syntax and semantics) of data or exchanged objects, of resources necessary to manage the communication and the cooperation between application processes, and of temporal aspects in the behaviour of the communication and processes. Giving some examples of possible verification without puting all the equipments on a testing platform, we show the interest of the verification regarding the test approach.