HLA Supported, Federation Oriented Enterprise Interoperability

Abstract

This chapter aims at presenting some future trends given in the final results of the INTEROP Network of Excellence (Chen et al., 2007) that prospect ways to support federation oriented enterprise interoperability. At first, a detailed definition of enterprise interoperability is given and the relevant concepts are structured in an Enterprise interoperability framework. A review will show two early collaborative interoperable platforms developed in the 90’s. Then, a review of more recent solutions to establish interoperability, which aim to solve previous shortcomings, is proposed. The study in this chapter focused on ongoing researches for solutions based on the High Level Architecture (HLA) at the technological level because it tends to provide the desired properties. This standard was originally developed for military interoperability of large simulators with real environment. Indeed, the HLA standard has been successfully transposed for enterprise interoperability at the implementation level, reusing modeling and simulation developed through years of experiences in distributed systems to manage causality, confidentiality and interoperability. The presentation of HLA platforms will be followed by a synthetic comparison of the various approaches. The state-of-the-art is concluded by presenting MDA (Model Driven Architecture) methodology which supports the transformation of enterprise models from conceptual level to models for execution or simulation and the emerging MDI (Model Driven Interoperability) methodology. From that postulate, it is proposed to rationalize the development lifecycle of distributed enterprise models by merging the HLA FEDEP and the MDA / MDI methodology to a unified lifecycle that will guide the development of distributed enterprises models from conceptual level to the implementation of an HLA compliant solution. At the end, and as a perspective, some discussion is given on methodology to facilitate the reuse of legacy platforms in new interoperable system of systems.