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Part I 85

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1529

Enterprise Int

86. Enterprise Integration and Interoperability

François B. Vernadat

Enterprise integration and interoperability deal

with facilitating communication, cooperation,

and collaboration within an organization, be it

a single organization or a networked organi-

zation, or be it a public or a private organiza-

tion. This chapter ﬁrst deﬁnes enterprise in-

tegration and systems interoperability and

presents relevant architectural frameworks. It

then explains the technical, semantic, and orga-

nizational dimensions of interoperability before

presenting essential standards and technology

for interoperability and integration. Applica-

tions and future trends are pointed out before

concluding.

86.1 Deﬁnitions and Background ..................1530

86.1.1 Enterprise Integration................. 1530

86.1.2 Systems Interoperability.............. 1531

86.1.3 Background ............................... 1531

86.2 Integration

and Interoperability Frameworks ...........1532

86.2.1 Technical Interoperability............ 1532

86.2.2 Semantic Interoperability............ 1533

86.2.3 Organizational Interoperability ....1533

86.3 Standards and Technology

for Interoperability...............................1533

86.4 Applications and Future Trends..............1535

86.5 Conclusion ...........................................1537

References ..................................................1537

Market globalization, worldwide competition, and fast

changing business conditions are forcing enterprises to

become more agile but also to increase communication,

collaboration, and networking with suppliers, partners

or distributors.

Enterprise integration and interoperability come

into play any time that two or more business entities

need to work together or need to share the same infor-

mation. A business entity is any part of an enterprise.

It can be of any size, ranging from a single worksta-

tion or an information technology (IT) system (e.g.,

a post in a department or an enterprise resource plan-

ning (ERP) system module) to a full organization unit

made up of people, systems, different pieces of equip-

ment, information stores, etc. In fact, it can even be any

node in a supply-chain network or any component of an

extended or virtual enterprise.

The need for enterprise integration, and for underly-

ing systems interoperability, results from the increasing

need to interconnect and seamlessly operate technical,

social, and information systems of geographically dis-

persed enterprises or of different enterprises working

together. This concerns the internal business pro-

cesses and services of a given enterprise as well as

cross-organizational business processes spanning part-

ner companies or networks of enterprises.

The challenge of integrating enterprise systems or

business entities comes from the large number and high

heterogeneity of enterprise components that are sub-

ject to be interconnected. When two systems have to

talk to each other or interoperate, they have to agree

on common message formats, transfer protocols, shared

(data) semantics, security and identiﬁcation aspects,

etc. For instance, if a bank and an insurance company

want to jointly offer real-estate loans with life insur-

ance, they have to align their customer data ﬁles, agree

on loan acceptance conditions and rules, and coordi-

nate respective local services (loan request processing,

loan approval/refusal, insurance condition setting, etc.)

into a common business process to offer a composite

service.

In this chapter, both enterprise integration and

interoperability are deﬁned, respective architectural

frameworks are presented and the underlying tech-

Part I 86

1530 Part I Home, Ofﬁce, and Enterprise Automation

nologies are discussed from a three-level perspective

(technical, application/semantic, and organizational di-

mensions). Finally, future trends are discussed before

concluding.

86.1 Deﬁnitions and Background

Enterprise integration and systems interoperability aim

at facilitating communication, cooperation, and col-

laboration between business entities. While enterprise

integration has a strong organizational dimension, in-

teroperability is more of a technical nature.

86.1.1 Enterprise Integration

Enterprise integration (EI) occurs when there is a need

to remove organizational barriers and/or improving

interactions among people, systems, applications, de-

partments, and companies (especially in terms of

material ﬂows, information/decision ﬂows, and control

or work ﬂows) [86.1,2]. The goal is to create synergy,

i.e., the integrated system offers more capability than

the sum of its components.

The complexity of EI relies on the fact that enter-

prises typically comprise hundreds, if not thousands, of

CIM/EI integration level

CIM/EI evolution

Coordination/

collaboration

Cooperation

Communication

Business

integration

Application

integration

Physical system

integration

Extended enterprise/virtual organization

Enterprise architectures enterprise portals CSCW

Organization & human aspects/BP coordination BPMN

Service orchestration Workflow BEPL EDM/WCM

EDI/EDIFACT STEP ebXML RosettaNet

SQL/xPath KQML/KIF RDF/OWL WSDL

Web services MOM/ESB Service registries UDDI

FTP, SMTP, HTTP .Net/J2EE HTML/XML SOAP

ISO-OSI TCP/IP ASI ATM Fast ethernet

Fig. 86.1 Enterprise integration levels and related technologies (es-

sential technical terms and acronyms appearing in the ﬁgure are

explained in Sect. 86.3 of this chapter and more information on

each of them can be found at http://whatis.techtarget.com)(FTP –

ﬁle transfer protocol, ISO-OSI – International Standards Organiza-

tion Open System Interconnection, ATM – asynchronous transfer

mode, J2EE – Java to Enterprise Edition, ASI – actuator sensor

interface)

applications (be they packaged solutions, custom-built

or legacy systems), some of them being remotely lo-

cated and support an even larger number of business

processes. This environment gets even more compli-

cated as companies these days are increasingly involved

in merger, fusion, acquisition, divestiture, and partner-

ship opportunities.

Integration of enterprise activities has long been,

and often still is, considered as a pure IT problem.

While it is true that at the end of the day the prime chal-

lenge of EI is to provide the right information to the

right place at the right time, business integration needs

must drive information system integration and not vice

versa. EI therefore has a strong organizational dimen-

sion, in addition to its control/management dimension

and its technological dimension.

From a pure IT standpoint, EI mostly means

connecting computer systems and IT applications to

support business processoperations [86.3,4]. It involves

technologies such as enterprise portals, data replication,

shared business functions with remote method invo-

cation, enterprise service buses, distributed business

processes (or workﬂow systems), and business-to-

business (B2B) integration.

From an organizational standpoint, EI is concerned

with facilitating information, control, and material

ﬂows across organization boundaries by connecting

all the necessary functions and heterogeneous func-

tional entities (e.g., information systems, devices,

applications, and people) in order to improve com-

munication (data and information exchanges at system

level), cooperation (interoperation at application level),

and coordination or collaboration (timely orchestra-

tion of process steps at business level) within this

enterprise so that it behaves as an integrated whole

(Fig.86.1) [86.1, 5]. It will therefore enhance overall

productivity, ﬂexibility, and capacity for the manage-

ment of change (i.e., agility). Li and Williams [86.6]

provide a broader deﬁnition of EI stating that en-

terprise integration is the coordination of all el-

ements including business, processes, people, and

technology of the enterprise(s) working together in

order to achieve the optimal fulﬁllment of the busi-

ness mission of that enterprise(s) as deﬁned by the

management.

Part I 86.1

Enterprise Integration and Interoperability 86.1 Deﬁnitions and Background 1531

Enterprise integration can apply vertically or hor-

izontally within any organization. Vertical integration

refers to integration of a line of business from its

top management down to its tactical planning and

operational levels (i.e., along the control structure).

Horizontal integration refers to integration of the var-

ious domains (i.e., business areas) of the enterprise or

with its partners and market environment (i.e., alongthe

supply/consumer chain structure).

Integration can range from loosely coupled to

tightly coupled and further to full system integration.

Full integration means that component systems are no

longer distinguishable in the whole integrated system.

Tightly coupled integration means that components are

still distinguishable in the whole but any modiﬁca-

tion to one of them may have direct impact on others.

Loosely coupled integration means that component sys-

tems continue to exist on their own but can also work as

components of the integrated system.

Putting in place interoperable enterprise systems is

essential to achieve enterprise integration with the level

of ﬂexibility and agility required by public or private

organizations to cope with the need for frequent organi-

zational changes.

As indicated by Fig.86.1, reaching the successive

levels of integration requires building on a number of

standards, languages, and technologies. Standardiza-

tion efforts have been reviewed by Chen and Vernadat

in [86.7] (Sect.86.3).

86.1.2 Systems Interoperability

Interoperability is deﬁned in the Webster dictionary as

“the ability of a system to use parts of another sys-

tem”. In IT terms, it can be deﬁned as the ability of two

or more information systems and of business processes

they support to exchange data, share information and

knowledge, or use functionality of one another.

Another deﬁnition hasrecently been providedby the

Athena project [86.8]. It deﬁnes interoperability of en-

terprise applications as the ability of a system to work

with other systems without special effort on the part of

their users.

More broadly speaking, enterprise interoperability

can be deﬁned as the ability of an enterprise to use in-

formation or services provided by one or more other

enterprises. This assumes on the part of the IT in-

frastructure the ability to send and receive messages

(requests or responses) or data streams. These ex-

changes can be made in synchronous or asynchronous

mode depending on communication needs.

Interoperability is indeed one of the many facets

of enterprise integration. An integrated family of sys-

tems must necessarily be interoperable in one form or

another. Interoperable systems do not need to be in-

tegrated. In fact, enterprise interoperability equates to

loosely coupled enterprise integration. It provides two

or more business entities (of the same organization or

from different organizations and irrespective of their lo-

cation) withthe ability to exchangeor share information

(wherever it is and at any time) and to use functions or

services of one another in a distributed and heteroge-

neous environment. Interacting component systems are

preserved as they are, can still work on their own, but

can at the same time interoperate seamlessly.

As for integrated systems, building and implement-

ing interoperable enterprise systems relies heavily on

the use of open standards, as indicated in Sect.86.3.

86.1.3 Background

Enterprise integration (EI) naturally emerged as a con-

cept inthe early 1990s from advances madein the1980s

in computer-integrated manufacturing (CIM) on the one

hand and in enterprise information integration (EII)on

the other hand. Both were aimed at interconnecting is-

lands of automation and information silos to liquify as

much as possible information and control ﬂows across

the organization. Distributed computing environments,

client–server architectures, federated databases, com-

mon network protocols, and remote procedure calls

were essential technologies during this early develop-

ment era.

With the advent of object-oriented computing,

open system architectures, and message queuing tech-

niques, complex pieces of middleware emerged in the

mid 1990s, the so-called enterprise application in-

tegration (EAI) platforms [86.9]. Among these, the

common object request broker architecture (CORBA)

has played a prominent role because of its open-

source nature, as promoted by the Object Management

Group [86.10].

It is also at this time that two major IT inventions

appeared: hyper-text transfer protocol (HTTP)andex-

tended markup language (XML) (Sect.86.4). They have

drastically changed the scene because these standards

opened thedoor toubiquitous computingand nearly full

independence to speciﬁc IT infrastructures (e.g., com-

puter networks, operatingsystems, computerlanguages,

etc.). This was a major step to get rid of EAI solutions

that were found to be too rigid, monolithic, and propri-

etary solutions and it made possible Internet computing

Part I 86.1

1532 Part I Home, Ofﬁce, and Enterprise Automation

and led to the emergence of web services at the turn of

the century.

Since then, while EI has rapidly evolved in

the organizational aspect, with new concepts coming

from enterprise architectures, business process manage-

ment (BPM), computer-supported collaborative work

(CSCW), and interorganizationalworkﬂowsystems, the

pressure for increased systems interoperability has con-

tinuously been accentuated with the growing needs

coming from new forms of organizations (e.g., sup-

ply chains, extended enterprises or virtual enterprises)

in terms of business process coordination and ser-

vice exchange. Service-oriented architectures (SOA)

and web services [86.11, 12] are playing a central

role in this area, as explained in the next sec-

tions.

86.2 Integration and Interoperability Frameworks

Enterprise integration and interoperability frameworks

are made of a set of principles, standards, guidelines,

and sometimes models that practitioners should apply

to put in place the right components in the proper or-

der to achieve integration and interoperability in their

organization.

An example EI framework is given by Fig. 86.1.

It comes from the computer-integrated manufactur-

ing open system architecture (CIMOSA) architecture

that has speciﬁcally been designed for CIM,i.e.,

integration in manufacturing enterprises [86.5]. The

framework emphasizes three integration levels, namely

systems integration, application integration, and busi-

ness integration, and positions different technologies or

languages to be used at each level.

Other architectures or frameworks exist (e.g., PERA

(purdue enterprise reference architecture), ARIS (ar-

chitecture for information systems), GRAI (graphes de

résultats et activités interreliés), GERAM (generalized

enterprise reference architecture and methodology),

European interoperability framework

Organization interoperability

Organisation & process alignment

(BPM; Process coordination)

Technical interoperability

Syntax, interaction & transport

(HTTP, SMTP ... over TCP/IP; SOAP)

Semantic interoperability

Semantic alignment

(Metadata registries, ontologies)

Real-world system

Information system

Real-world system

Information system

Fig. 86.2 European Interoperability Framework (EIF)(after

[86.13])

IDEF (integrated deﬁnition method), etc.), and have

been reviewed in a book by Vernadat [86.1].

Similarly, a number of frameworks are being de-

veloped for interoperability; for instance, levels of

information systems interoperability (LISI) from an Ar-

chitecture Working Group of the US Department of De-

fense (on Command, Control, Communications, Com-

puters, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance

– C4ISR) deﬁnes ﬁve levels of interoperability [86.14]:

•

Level 0 – isolated systems (manual extraction and

integration of data)

•

Level 1 – connected interoperability in a peer-to-

peer environment

•

Level 2 – functional interoperability in a distributed

environment

•

Level 3 – domain-based interoperability in an inte-

grated environment

•

Level 4 – enterprise-based interoperability in a uni-

versal environment.

The European Interoperability Framework (EIF)is

a more generic framework jointly developed by the Eu-

ropean Commission (EC) and the member states of the

European Union (EU) to address business and gov-

ernment needs for information exchange [86.13]. This

framework deﬁnesthree essentiallevels (ordimensions)

of interoperability, namely technical, semantic, and or-

ganizational from bottom up, as depicted by Fig.86.2.

These dimensions are further explained in the next

sections.

86.2.1 Technical Interoperability

This dimension covers technical issues or plumbing as-

pects of interoperability. It deals with connectivity and

is to date the most developed dimension. It ensures

that systems get physically connected and that data and

messages can be reliably transferred across systems. It

is about linking computer systems and applications or

Part I 86.2

Enterprise Integration and Interoperability 86.3 Standards and Technology for Interoperability 1533

interconnecting information systems by means of so-

called middleware components. It includes key aspects

such as open interfaces, interconnection services, data

transport, data presentation and exchange, accessibility,

and security services.

At the very bottom level are network protocols

(TCP/IP (transmission control protocol/internet proto-

col)) and on top transport protocols such (HTTP, SMTP

(simple mail transfer protocol), etc.) to exchange data in

the form of XML messages.

86.2.2 Semantic Interoperability

This dimension of interoperability concerns seman-

tic alignment, i.e., the ability to achieve meaningful

exchange and sharing of information, and not only

data, among independently developed systems. It is

concerned with ensuring that the precise meaning of

exchanged information is understandable by any other

application that was not initially developed for this

purpose.

Semantic interoperability enables systems to re-

format or adapt received information (e.g., convert

euros into dollars) or combine it with other infor-

mation resources and to process it in a meaningful

manner for the recipient. It is therefore a prerequisite

for the front-end (multilingual) delivery of services to

users.

Beyond information system interoperability, coop-

eration between systems should also be possible. This

means that the different systems must be able to pro-

vide each other context-aware services, i.e., services

that can be usedin different types of situations,that they

can call or that they can use to enable the emergence of

higher-level composite services.

Technologies involved at this level include meta-

data registries, thesauri or ontologies to map semantic

deﬁnitions of the same concepts used by the different

systems involved. In IT, an ontology [86.15] is a shared

formal speciﬁcation of some domain knowledge. It

is usually expressed in ﬁrst-order logic or languages

such as knowledge query and manipulation language

(KQML) to be exchanged with knowledge interchange

format (KIF) or in the form of semantic networks or

taxonomies, for instance, resource description frame-

work (RDF) and web ontology language (OWL), the

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) web ontology lan-

guage [86.16].

86.2.3 Organizational Interoperability

This dimension of interoperability is concerned with

deﬁning business goals, modeling business processes,

and bringing collaboration capabilities to organiza-

tions that wish to exchange information and may

have different internal structures and processes. More-

over, organizational interoperability aims at addressing

the requirements of the user community by making

services available, easily identiﬁable, accessible, and

user-centric. In other words, it is the ability of organi-

zations to provide services to each other as well as to

users or the wider public.

To achieve organizational interoperability, it is

necessary to align business processes of cooperat-

ing business entities, deﬁne synchronization steps and

messages, and deﬁne coordination and collaboration

mechanisms for interorganizational processes. This re-

quires business process management (BPM)forthe

modeling and control of these business processes, work-

ﬂow engines for the coordination of the execution of

their steps deﬁned as business services, collaborative

tools, and enterprise portals to provide user-friendly ac-

cess to business services and information pages made

available to end-users.

86.3 Standards and Technology for Interoperability

As mentioned in the previous sections, a certain num-

ber of standards and technologies need to be considered

to achieve the three levels of enterprise integration and

interoperability. Essential ones include (from bottom up

of Fig.86.1):

1. XML: The extended markup language is a widely

used, standardized tagged language proposed and

maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium

(W3C). It has been proposed to be a univer-

sal format for structured content and data on the

web but can indeed be used for any computer-

based exchange. Its simple and open structure has

revolutionized data, information, and request/reply

exchanges among computer systems because XML

messages can be handled by virtually any transport

protocol due to its alphanumeric and platform-

independent nature [86.17].

2. HTTP/HTTPS: Hypertext transfer protocol is the set

of rules for transferring ﬁles (text, graphic images,

Part I 86.3

1534 Part I Home, Ofﬁce, and Enterprise Automation

sound, video, and other multimedia ﬁles) on the

World Wide Web. HTTP is an application protocol

that runs on top of the TCP/IP suite of protocols.

Because of its ubiquity it has become an essential

standard for communications. HTTP 1.1 is the cur-

rent version (http://www.w3.org/Protocols/).

3. Web services and service-oriented architectures

(SOAs): Since the year 2000, service-oriented ar-

chitectures represent a new generation of IT system

architectures taking advantage of message-oriented,

loosely coupled, asynchronous systems as well as

web services [86.11,12,18]. SOAs provide business

analysts, integration architects, and IT developers

with a broad abstract view of applications and inte-

gration components to be dealt with as encapsulated

and reusable high-level services. Web services can

be deﬁned as interoperable software objects that can

be assembled over the Internet using standard proto-

cols and exchange formats to perform functions or

execute business processes [86.12]. They are acces-

sible by the external world by their unique resource

locator (URL), they are described by their interface,

and can be implemented in any computer language.

Web services use the following de facto standards

for their implementation:

– WSDL: The web service description language

is a contract language used to declare the

web service interface and access methods in

a universal language using speciﬁc description

templates [86.19].

– SOAP: The simple object access protocol is

a communication protocol and a message layout

speciﬁcation that deﬁnes a uniform way of pass-

ing XML-encoded data between two interacting

software entities (for instance, web services).

SOAP is under consideration by the World Wide

Web Consortium to become a standard in the

ﬁeld of Internet computing [86.20]. It still lacks

security mechanisms for the transfer of sensi-

tive data and messages but can deal with data

encryption.

– UDDI: The universal description, discovery, and

integration speciﬁcation is an XML-based reg-

istry proposal for worldwide businesses to list

their services offered on the Internet as web ser-

vices. The goal is to streamline online transac-

tions by enabling companies to ﬁnd one another

on the web and make their services interopera-

ble for e-Commerce. UDDI is often compared

to a telephone book’s white, yellow, and green

pages. Within a company or within a network of

companies, a private service registry can be es-

tablished in a similar way and format to UDDI

in order to manage all shared business and data

services used across the business units.

4. Service registries: A service registry is a metadata

repository that maintains a common description of

all services registered for the functional domain for

which it has been set up. Services are described by

their name, their owner, their service level agree-

ment and quality of service, their location, and their

access method. It is used by service owners to

expose their services and by services users to lo-

cate services. Commercial products based on UDDI

specs are available.

5. Message and service buses – MOM/ESB: The

key to building interoperable enterprise systems

and service-oriented architectures that are reliable

and scalable is to ensure loose coupling among

services and applications. This can be achieved

using message queuing techniques, and especially

message-oriented middleware (MOM) products and

their recent extension known as enterprise service

buses (ESB) [86.4, 21]. Services and IT appli-

cations exchange messages in a neutral format

(preferably XML

) using simple transport protocols

(i.e., XML/SOAP on TCP/IP, SMTP or HTTP).

A message-oriented middleware is a messaging sys-

tem that provides the ability to connect applications

in an asynchronous message exchange fashion us-

ing message queues. It provides the ability to create

and manage message queues, to manage the rout-

ing of messages, and to ﬁx priorities of messages.

Messages can be delivered according to three basic

messaging models:

– Point-to-point model, in which only one con-

sumer may receive messages that are sent to

a queue by one or more producers

– Publish-and-subscribe, in which multiple con-

sumers may register, or subscribe, to receive

messages (called topics) from the same message

queue

– Request/reply, which allows reliable bidirec-

tional communications between two peer sys-

tems (using input queues and output queues)

An enterprise service bus goes beyond the capabil-

ities of a MOM. It is a standards-based integration

platform that combines messaging of a MOM,web

services, data transformation, database access ser-

vices, intelligent routing of messages, and even

workﬂow execution to reliably connect and coordi-

nate the interaction of signiﬁcantnumbers of diverse

Part I 86.3