Improved Airport Enterprise Service Bus with Self-Healing Architecture (IAESB-SH)

Introduction

Airports need to adapt new technologies to react effectively and quickly to customers’ needs and to provide a better service such as the electronic ticket. In addition to the challenges of the ability to respond to the growing requirements of the automatic information interchange between the different systems to ensure safe and efficient airport operations. Most of the challenges in the Airport systems today lie in the ability to respond to the growing requirements of the automatic information interchange between the different departments including operational, statistical, aviation and financial information. In addition, the integration with the existing legacy systems to ensure safe and efficient airport operations. All the operations in the airport are driven by the exchanged information; Airport business units create information, transform information, distribute information, and take action on received information. Airports’ systems are developed by different vendors and were not designed to be interoperable, which makes systems integration a very complicated and not easy to be implemented. Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) provides the ability to address the distributed computing requirements; protocol independent, loosely coupled, reusability and standard based (Papazoglou & Heuvel, 2007). It is based on the Web Services; distributed, loosely coupled, reusable software components that encapsulate a discrete functionality and can be accessed using standard internet and XML- based protocols (Sommerville, 2007). SOA encourages a lot of businesses to move toward the adapting the SOA architecture to enable the response to change faster and to cut the cost of replacing the legacy systems that they have and integrate with the new systems so all the information can be accessed and shared by all the systems (Keen et al., 2004; Minoli, 2008), accordingly; SOA will provide a guideline for airport Information systems architecture design, development and integration. The functionality provided by the integration platform Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) is based on the SOA that utilizes Web service standards to supports a variety of communication patterns over multiple transport protocols to connect different applications and technologies (Papazoglou & Heuvel, 2007). In addition, the features of loosely coupling and breaking up the integration logic into separate parts can be easily managed (Keen et al. 2004). ESB provides architecture based on the SOA that improves the information accessibility and sharing across the different Airport’s departments. Furthermore, it provides a component interface to existing legacy system so it can be integrated with other applications, accessed over the web, and support the reusability of the legacy systems. Also, the Self-Healing Agents which will improve and maximize the system’s reliability, adaptability, robustness and availability.